How the NFL Diagrams In-House and Remote Video Workflows
The NFL played a big role at the recent Streaming Media West conference in Huntington Beach, California. Besides delivering the opening day keynote, the organization also offered best practices for webcasting sporting events. During a first day panel, Shannon Rutherford, manager of video systems engineering for digital media at the NFL, explained how his company organizes digital production workflows.
"There's a lot of different workflows. It depends on what the product is," Rutherford explained. "Some workflows are complicated in the sense that we have a stadium, and there's a lot of cameras and there's a lot of acquisition happening from trucks. We get backhaul from those trucks both over fiber and satellite. We have a lot of ways to then route those feeds to many of our different facilities across America: New York, New Jersey, Los Angeles. That's one sort of use case, and then we centralized areas where we can ingest those feeds into encoders, send those encoded feeds up to a CDN."
When the feed is created in-house, the workflow is simpler.
"Other use cases would be where we have a studio and it's a little bit shorter of a daisy chain," Rutherford added. "We have the green screen room, we have talent, they're doing analysis. We're literally taking the output of the production—like the TriCaster that we use—route that mixed program down…to an encoder, and then it goes up to the CDN."
To hear more best practices, watch the full session below.
Best Practices for Webcasting Sporting Events
For major sporting events, it is no longer enough to produce a traditional broadcast television program alone. Fans want more access to their favorite players, sports, and teams in real time. Through live webcasting, fans now have a VIP pass to almost every aspect of a major sporting event. In this session learn from top sports brands how they are expanding their reach for large-scale sporting events with live streaming. The session covers driving fan awareness of live, sports-related content with shoulder programming, social media integration, distribution of highlights across a variety of platforms, and more.
Moderator: Philip Nelson, Chief Relationship Officer - NewTek
Shannon Rutherford, Manager, Video Systems Engineering, Digital Media - NFL
Mike McLeod, Senior Manager, Advertising Technology & Products - PGA Tour Digital
Allen de la Cruz, SVP, Engineering - Major League Gaming
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