Live from Dublin: ESPN moves goal posts for college football season opener By Fergal Ringrose
Tuesday, August 27, 2024 - 08:51
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ESPN aired its College GameDay show live from Dublin city centre (Picture: NEP Ireland)
Host city Dublin staged the Aer Lingus College Football Classic on Saturday 24 August for the Week Zero season-opening game between Georgia Tech and Florida State University at the Aviva Stadium. Host broadcaster ESPN's College GameDay show aired directly from Dame Street in Dublin city centre, the first time the pre-game show has been broadcast from outside the US.
ESPN implemented a remote production model for the first time for the Aviva match broadcast and also introduced its first deployment of cloud-based SuperMo replay with two SSMO cameras in the REMI game format. On Saturday TG4 became the first Irish broadcaster to screen the match live on free-to-air television in Ireland. It was also the first college football match in Ireland to feature the Ross SpiderCam aerial cabled cam system, capturing the line of scrimmage from above the pitch at the Aviva Stadium.
The 2024 Aer Lingus College Football Classic was a 47,000 ticket sell-out, with over 25,000 Americans travelling from the US to attend the match. The event has become a major milestone in the Irish sporting calendar, enhancing tourism and boosting the local economy to the tune of roughly 180 million each August.
Commenting on the REMI production and cloud-based replay overlay on match day-1, ESPN executive director remote operations John LaChance tells SVG Europe: It's a dual collaborative effort between the infrastructure here and back at our base in Bristol [Connecticut], and it's working well. We have done the Aer Lingus Classic multiple times now, but this is our first time as a remote integrated telecast. We do many REMIs, but the uniqueness here is that it's international and integrating from Dublin represents a challenge.
Pitchside at the Aviva one hour before Week Zero kickoff
ESPN GameDay is live for the first time outside the United States, with a more traditional production model in College Green, adds ESPN operations specialist Kevin Cleary. Dublin's a great place for it, along with the Aer Lingus Classic which is a fantastic event.
The Irish fans and all the fans that come from America really get that Week Zero show. It's unlike anything else when it comes to the pride that folks have in coming here to support their team. TG4 is broadcasting the game for the first time in Gaelic, so the Irish-speaking public can now enjoy the occasion as well.
There's a significant portion of our show that utilises not only cloud-based servers but also direct internet connection that goes back and forth. We have our IPMC encoders on-site. One of the larger challenges is distribution here locally: we are a 1080p show and the local broadcaster, TG4, is 1080i.
Also, the individual signals back to Bristol are encoded with audio channels because our announcers are on-site. So we have an A1 here to manage all processing of signals and embedding of audio channels, and working on our comms. We do remote tallies from Bristol to here and we also have a Unity comms connect. Our clock and score and our telestrator are all in the REMI model established for college football.
Individually we have 20 1080p paths of outbound transmission and five 1080i inbound transmission, he continues, and that is our program for distribution and monitoring with camera return and an inbound signal that feeds ESPN GameDay to the house pre-match, so that the folks that are here can see the GameDay show.
There are two 1080p 4x super slomos with all four phases of each going into a Riedel Venue Gateway we brought here, connecting to an AWS workflow to Bristol. It's the first time we've integrated cloud-based super slomo on college football and the first time we've done it internationally, said Cleary.
The individual phases from each SSMO camera were encoded to SRT via the Venue Gateway encoder to AWS Elemental MediaConnect in the Dublin AWS region. The AWS Elemental MediaConnect in Dublin then connected to AWS Elemental MediaConnect in the US-East region and the individual phases were decoded in two Riedel ViBox servers deployed in US-East.
Two replay operators located in Bristol connected to the servers to control and operate super-mo replay, with two outputs coming down to Bristol's transmission department for integration into the REMI production. ESPN PCR personnel utilised file transfer workflows to push pre-edits to the server and melt clips to the Bristol archive. By utilising AWS resources in both Dublin and Virginia, video transport latency was reduced from site to the AWS data centres and control latency was reduced for the operators in Bristol.
NEP delivers Dublin venues for ESPN OBs
Georgia Tech was designated the home team for the Aer Lingus Classic and used the stadium's home locker room. Match production featured eight Sony HDC 3500 hard cams, one Sony HDC 3500 cabled HH beauty cam; two field hand-held Sony HDC 3500 radio/RF HH cams; a Panasonic PTZ Hot Head for in-cam commentary; two Sony HDC 3500/2500 cameras for play & match clock; and three Marshall POV/pencil cams for coaches booths/talent snoop.
In addition, for the first time on college football, a Ross SpiderCam operated in the stadium plus a drone system flew outside, supplied by Upshot Productions and managed on-site by John McMahon. On the SpiderCam were four Sony P43-H cameras with Newton S2 NH25 remote heads. The SpiderCam Control Station located in the media tribune area served as the master control unit of the aerial system, controlling the movement of the four SpiderCam winches via Ethernet over fibre cables. Motion control, error handling and a safety report were updated in
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Live from Dublin: ESPN moves goal posts for college football season opener By Fergal Ringrose 
