Streaming Big 12 Golf with LiveU Backpacks

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Jacob Potter: Golf is one of our big challenges that we kind of hang our hat on, that we're able to actually execute it. It's not common for college networks to produce that because it's such a large animal, such a big thing to try to tackle. You basically have a very large space, similar to doing fishing, but there's not as much water. So, the point is to stay out of the water in golf. But basically we have an at-home control room, like you've been hearing a lot of these people talk about. So, our challenge is to get those camera signals to our control room, 'cause it's not feasible for us to disassemble and unrack all of our equipment and take it to the golf course.

But with golf you have so many cameras, the distances are so far, we thought the only option was to rent enough cellular bond packs at every camera location. But, whenever we started to develop this idea and as we've gone on over the years, what we've actually ended up doing, is doing line cuts from each hole. So what that allows us to do is, the cable leads straight to the camera, back to the green or to the tee box, whatever makes the most sense, into a very small switcher that's about the size of an iPad, and we're switching the camera feeds onsite and then taking that SDI out into our LiveU pack, and sending that back to our centralized control room.

So, the control room back at our football stadium, actually in Oklahoma, we have all these feeds coming in and we're able to go to that hole. We don't even have to worry about taking a certain camera. That cut is already coming to us as the correct tee shot, then green, back to tee, what have you. So that actually allowed us to do a eleven camera broadcast with just four live view backpacks. So, in the end, we were able to execute this and I was able to look at our administration and say, "Hey, we didn't even have to spend any extra money to do this, because we already used what we had in-house and just what we had layin' around." So, it's a little bit of a different way to look at this technology and a way to utilize it. This really is a tool to transmit not just a single feed, but multiple feeds at any given time.

Troy Dreier: I just wanna emphasize this, 'cause I find this so interesting. Your efficiency that you've developed here, so you have four units that you have in house?

Jacob Potter: Correct.

Troy Dreier: Right, and so you have this large event that you thought you would need like, ten, right? And how did you make four do the work of ten?

Jacob Potter: Each hole has multiple cameras and so, say a par-3 would have three cameras, we'd have one in the tee box, and two on the green to do tight shots, wide shots of the green, whatever it might be. So those three cameras would be mixed down to one live view stream. So however many holes in a par-5, might have more cameras, but regardless, it's still coming down to one switch stream in the end. Same concept we've applied to things like pregame shows, Ben mentioned football stadiums having hundred thousand plus people in there, so being able to get a good connection isn't necessarily reliable, but we often can order an ethernet drop on the field from the stadiums, but that's only one drop. So we utilize the same concept. We're taking our cameras that are there onsite, mixing them before we feed into that transmission signal to send it back so that we're able to get what we wanna accomplish via the means that we have, which in those cases, would be a single ethernet drop.