EXTRA March 2020
Delivering the Broadcast Experience To esports
Delivering the Broadcast Experience to esports Part sporting event, part live show and much more by Peter Suciu
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he global market for esports—professional video game competitions—reached more than 450 million viewers globally last year according to data from market research firm NewZoo. As esports continues to attract more young fans—who are picking up a controller instead of a ball—revenues are also on the rise, and are forecast to grow from $1.1 billion last year to $1.8 in 2022, which is why it is being taken seriously as one of the fastest growing sports worldwide. The past few years have even seen purpose-built esports facilities, including the HyperX Esports Arena in the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas and the Blizzard Arena on the Burbank Studios lot outside Los Angeles. To ensure that the broadcast competitions can match the level of the NFL or the Olympics in presentation, esports promoters are turning to broadcast production vendors, while also hiring the right talent to pull it all together. “If I was in charge of an esports production company I’d try to hire two people,” said Cameron Reed, business development manager for esports at Ross Video. “One is whoever produces ESPN’s ‘GameDay’ and the other is whoever does ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and I’d put them in a room together.” The complexity of esports can’t be understated, as each competition brings the challenges equal to that of the Super Bowl as well as its half time show. A major esports competition can be described as equal parts sporting event, rock concert and action movie all in one. “We’re seeing more facilities being built up for these events, but others are repurposing multi-use facilities, and each comes with challenges,” added Reed. “But the presentations all are the same, which is why we’re seeing production teams that include a combina-
On the Cover
LIGHTS, CAMERA, SO MUCH ACTION
Esports is unique from other sports in that the player/athlete isn’t actually on a field but is rather static on a stage, while the “action” or gameplay occurs in a virtual/digital realm that is presented on massive monitors for the audience to view. While those players aren’t often animated, the in-game action can be, in a word “intense,” when combined with lighting effects that add to the immersion. The result can be sensory overload. “There are parallels to regular sports, but the rock concert analogy is very good,” said Charles Conroy, vice president of gaming for The Switch, a production platform for live esports coverage. “There isn’t an actual field, so there are no boundaries.” While this opens the ability to capture the action in unique ways,
In This Issue Delivering the Broadcast Experience to esports.............................................. 3 HPA Tech Retreat Makes An ‘Instant’ Movie..................................................... 8 NextGen TV Can Give Broadcasters a ‘Level Playing Field’..................... 11 Building a Tech Vision............................................ 16
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LCS EU Finals match of Summer Split 2018 between Fnatic and Schalke 04 at Vistalegre Palace in Madrid, Spain.
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March 2020 :: Broadcast Engineering EXTRA
tion of old time TV veterans—typically the engineer and technical director—along with kids who really know the games.”
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it also presents challenges. For Super Bowl LIV, Fox Sports deployed 70 manned and robotic cameras, along with 30-plus lock-off and POV units. Esports can often require even more cameras on the stage, the players, the audience and all the virtual cameras that capture the in-game experience. “This is far more challenging than a regular sporting event,” said Chris Merrill, director of product marketing at Grass Valley. “There is the stage lighting and the audience is in shadows so there are no common light levels, while the LEDs have flicker that results in a strobing due to the refresh rate. You need to have the right tools to manage all those levels and do so without a shader Cameron Reed, business development that is constantly trying manager for esports, Ross Video to address it. It is in fact a similar problem to a rock concert.” Given that the most important visuals are what the players see, it would be easy to think that corners could be cut with the cameras in the actual arena but this is far from the case.
“If I was in charge of an esports production company I’d try to hire two people. One is whoever produces ESPN’s ‘GameDay’ and the other is whoever does ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and I’d put them in a room together.” —Cameron Reed, Ross Video “Any lower end pro AV camera will pick up the strobing and there is no easy way to deal with it,” added Merrill. “You need consistency as these events are broadcast all over the world. Esports has evolved from being on Twitch and other online gaming channels. It is now on Fox and ESPN and you need to meet their high level of standards.” Many of the facilities for esports weren’t designed with such competitions, but more are being built—and can thus address many of these lighting and camera challenges. “You will see more and more facilities built up over the next year,” added Conroy. “Esports are now being taken very seriously by the audience, and this is why the production teams must treat it like any other live event.”
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GAME CONTROL
Pulling all the various sources together involves its own magic, and this includes broadcast-quality switchers, comms and KVM tools. While these can too often be afterthoughts for smaller productions, for esports it can be crucial to have the right equipment to pull it together. “We do think of the switcher as the backbone of the production,” said Ross Video’s Reed. “A powerful switcher and the right director are critical for the sole reason that—much like news—box effects are the name of the game.” Because it is impossible to cut away from the in-game action, having these effects can allow the viewers to see the player and/or crowd action. “It is like a boxing match,” added Reed. “You have to keep the
“This is far more challenging than a regular sporting event.” —Chris Merrill, Grass Valley cameras trained on the action at all times—if you cut away from the action and miss that ‘knockout’ it could be career suicide.” The switcher can also make it easier for a production to utilize graphics presentations that include stats from the game in real time. “The game happens way too fast to have someone manually enter the stats,” explained Reed. “You need to have automated triggers and automated data that can be retrieved quickly. I’ve seen events that are streamed in three languages, and with only one operator, we were able to take in data from the web API, and get the stats sent out to each feed.” While the “field” of play differs from other sports, the technical management of video distribution is basically the same, and this is where the KVM switch needs to handle high-end Charles Conroy, vice president of gaming for resolution, full frame rate The Switch accuracy and provide latency-free mouse movements. “Gaming software producers and video editors count on our products to support both real-time and playback requirements,” said Dan Holland, marketing manager for KVM provider IHSE USA in Cranbury, NJ. “IHSE is working with companies like EVS to create extenders that can be integrated in the live digital arena requiring frame rates up to 240fps while simultaneously synchronizing secondary outputs at
Esports is unique among sports in that the player/athlete isn’t actually on a field.
60fps for traditional broadcast and live-event streaming.” The new KVM extenders with 240 Hz to 60 Hz synchronized sequential frame rate conversion for esports events enable live screen display, broadcast and super slow-motion replay direct from gaming computers. Holland added, “In addition to super slo-mo action replay, the new devices enable direct broadcast of esports events via on-air transmission and online and social media distribution.” THE VIDEO GAME AUDIO EXPERIENCE
With esports it is all too easy to think about the “video” aspect as these are matches built around video games, but audio is certainly as important and can present even more challenges for these broadcast productions. The audio can include what the audience hears, what the players hear and notably what the production team hears. The result is the loudness of a rock concert and action movie, but with the added challenge of allowing for players to communicate with one another while not hearing the commentary, (which could sway their gameplay). “The noisy environment is certainly an issue,” said Stephen Sandford, senior product manager for intercom provider Clear-Com. “Unlike other sports there needs to be comms for the gamers so they can hear teammates. But this also means high isolation headsets so that the other team doesn’t hear this chatter.” There is also the communications between the director and the crew, but at the same time the cameramen can’t be totally isolated from the arena noise.
“The cameramen will have high isolation headsets with multiple channels, and with one ear open to the environment,” added Sandford. “There is still a little bit of analog feeds, but most of it is digital these days and all of it will go through CAT-5 so there is no interference.” Sandford also noted that intercoms can be the last thing people think about. “The show can’t go on without the comms,” he said. “People soon realize the importance of a good set of comms.” For the audience watching at home sound is also crucial, and is an area where corners shouldn’t be cut. “If you put it on Twitch or YouTube that is one thing,” said Chris Fichera, vice president of Group One Ltd., the U.S. distributor for audio solutions company Calrec. “If you want this on TV and Dolby is involved, it is a different level entirely. You have to start with a good engineer who understands gaming as well as broadcast. This includes those from live sound and bridges the gap.” The right equipment and the right person can be crucial to ensuring the audience at home doesn’t miss an audio beat. “The sound coming out of the actual venue is as important as the commentators,” added Fichera. “I compare it to a basketball game, which is noisy with the music, the audience and the commentators. The sound from the court and players isn’t as loud, so esports takes this up a notch with the game sounds. We’ve seen audio production evolve quickly, and as the sport grows the audio will be a key component that grows with it.”. ■ March 2020 :: Broadcast Engineering EXTRA
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HPA Tech Retreat Makes An ‘Instant’ Movie Program intersperses movie shoot and presentations on technologies making it possible by James O’Neal
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he 25th anniversary edition of the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) Tech Retreat got underway here with a “first”—a complete motion picture “short” that was shot, assembled and “premiered” all in a single day. Although some of the production’s scenes had been recorded earlier, a large portion of the action was captured during the Feb. 18 conference’s opening day program that interspersed the filmmaking with presentations about the various technologies that were used to put the 11-minute comedy together. Shooting took place at the Westin Mission Hills Golf Resort & Spa— The HPA cinematic production featured a mix of professional and volunteer actors. where the four-day HPA Tech Retreat is now available to moviemakers—including the use of cloud storage taking place—as well as on the hotel grounds, and some additional and playout—that make it possible to greatly shorten production action being captured by drone in a nearby southern California time for cinematic productions, allowing operations that formerly desert. The interior scenes featured action both on stage and off, took days and weeks of post-production effort to be done in near-real with conference attendees time. interacting with actors at The HPA cinematic production featured a mix of professional one point in the script. and volunteer actors, including SMPTE’s executive director, Bar“The Lost Lederhobara Lange. It was directed by Hollywood veteran Steven Shaw, with sen” was the brainchild another television and motion picture notable, Roy Wagner, serving of Joachim “JZ” Zell, vice as director of photography. president of technology To achieve the extremely quick turnaround time, the production at EFILM, a Los Angelesutilized “virtual production stage” technology, in which prepared based company specialvideo backgrounds and scenery are inserted into the live action in izing in digital imaging. real time through the use of large LED video display screens, rather Zell developed the movie’s than being done in post-production via the more conventional, but storyline, and serve as the time-consuming, greenscreen process for montaging such footage. project’s host and producer. As explained by conference presenter and chief executive ofHe explained that this “inficer at Stargate Studios, Sam Nicholson, a large degree of realism stant movie” was all about is achieved in virtual production stage scenes through the use of demonstrating technologies Joachim “JZ” Zell
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The short incorporated all the elements of a “real” Hollywood production.
on-camera “trackers” which allow computers to precisely follow camera movement and adjust the video being inserted into the scene accordingly to mimic what would be experienced in a realworld situation. Even the brightness and color temperature of the background display screens can automatically track changes to match what would happen in a real-world environment. “If you kill all of the lights on the set, everything will adjust dayto-night,” said Nicholson. “So you save a tremendous amount of time on set because all lights are slaved to a virtual environment. If you go into a tunnel the lights go out. As daylight changes, lights track these changes. Again, everything comes back to what we’ve learned in postproduction. That expertise is now being applied to photography.” The short incorporated all elements of a “real” Hollywood produc-
tion, including an ACES workflow; color correction; even delivery of “dailies” and an “outtake” reel. Editing was done on three Avid Media Composers located in a Hollywood facility, all cloud-connected to the previously ingested footage. Sound effects and audio “sweetening” operations were performed by Skywalker Sound at the Skywalker Ranch in northern California. The services of a number of other companies were employed, ranging from Amazon Web Services to Frame.io and Red Bee, to handle such production tasks as color grading and even minimizing the appearance of facial blemishes on some cast members. In addition to demonstrating how cinematic production time can be drastically reduced by performing tasks on set as the shooting occurs— instead of in post-production on the set as the shooting occurs—the HPA “Lederhosen” project illustrated how cloud technology can allow multiple entities operating from a number of widely spread geographic locations to collaborate on handle post-production. Five loaned cameras were used in the shooting of “The Lost Lederhosen:” an ARRI Alexa, a Sony Venice, a RED Monstro2, Blackmagic Design URSA mini pro, and a Panavision DXL2. Reaction to the full day of movie production interwoven with technical presentations about various aspects of the project was very positive as judged by applause and cheers that followed the screening of the short. HPA organizers are promising similar events at future Tech Retreats. A “Lost Lederhosen” trailer is available for viewing at https:// vimeo.com/387515173. ■
Cast and crew members ready for a “take” on a sound stage improvised in the HPA Tech Retreat presentation venue.
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NextGen TV Can Give Broadcasters a ‘Level Playing Field’ Broadcasters panel also discussed the impact cloud and IP will have on the industry’s future by James E. O’Neal
“When we went from analog to ATSC 1.0, this was mandated by the govern“Broadcasters’ Panel” has been a ment,” said Goldman. “That’s not hapfixture at the HPA Tech Retreat pening now. Without the aid of additionprogram for years, with repreal channels and bandwidth, how will the sentatives from networks, station groups transition to the new service be possible and industry organizations sharing their without negatively impacting over-thethoughts on contemporary TV industry air service?” developments and issues. This year was “It’s going to take a little bit of legerno exception, with Dave Folsom from demain,” said Folsom. “There is a little Pearl TV; Fox TV’s Richard Friedel; bit of extra bandwidth in [the ATSC 1.0] Del Parks, from the Sinclair Broadcast signal that we have now. If we can, by Group; and the NAB’s Skip Pizzi assemmarket, essentially clear one channel at bling to field questions from moderator a time of those individual services and MediaKind’s Matthew Goldman in a move them and share them on other Wednesday morning session. channels, to the viewer there will not be any difference. TEST MARKET “This will free up a channel, and this Topics this time ranged from the Phoechannel can carry up to five services nix Model Market project to the evolution because new codecs are much more efof IP and cloud for broadcasters. ficient,” Folsom continued. “This will Goldman kicked off the discussion by provide the mechanism—on a rolling asking Folsom to describe the Phoenix basis—to clear spectrum for new services Model Market and explain why it was without losing your ATSC 1 audience.” Matthew Goldman served as moderator of the ‘Broadcasters important in the effort to rollout NextWith so many options for video delivPanel’ discussion. Gen TV. ery available now, why should consum“It’s the result of the FCC in the late ers even care about a new over the air fall of 2017 coming out with a Report and Order allowing broadcastbroadcast standard? Goldman asked the panel. ers to make use of the newly-developed ATSC 3.0 standard,” replied “For the consumer, one of the largest impacts that [NextGen Folsom. “How do you make that [initiation of 3.0 service] happen? TV] will have is that it finally addresses the idea of broadcast and Pearl, which is made up of nine large station groups, decided to broadband convergence,” Pizzi said. “Today, smart TV’s are already create a model market, or model station, in Phoenix to see how this connected to the internet and a conventional television source, but transition could be done without adding spectrum. We also provide you’re switching between the two. ATSC 3.0 puts those two together a forum for manufacturers of technical equipment for the new stanin a continuously variable way.” dard to test their equipment, as well as for receiver manufacturers to “It’s about better pictures and sound,” Friedel added. “This is retest their products.” ally going to impact the industry. There will also be a bunch of new Goldman asked how NextGen TV would be implemented, as TV business opportunities to capitalize on” broadcast spectrum space is at a premium now with the loss of chanSinclair’s Parks thought that NextGen TV would return television nels in connection with the current repack. broadcasting to a more local and live presence.
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This year’s HPA Tech Retreat ‘Broadcasters Panel’ included (L-R) Dave Folsom, Richard Friedel, Skip Pizzi and Del Parks.
“When you look at where entertainment—syndicated television—is going, it’s really not going anywhere,” said Parks. “Much of the shows produced are for streaming services. Linear TV is migrating to live broadcast…very local and very live sports, news, and local programming. It’s just not viable for Hollywood to produce syndicated programs like they used to. It just doesn’t work.” “OTT is anything but live and local,” said. Pizzi. “This live, localfocused service [brought about by NextGen TV] can co-exist on a more even parity in terms of quality and interactivity with those other services” said Pizzi. “NextGen TV really gives broadcasters a level playing field going forward.” THE MOVE TO DATA
The discussion then shifted to the relationship of NextGen TV to cloud and its relevance to broadcasting. “I think the cloud is very important,” replied Sinclair’s Parks. “I don’t believe we’ll get to a NextGen TV distribution system without moving to the cloud. NextGen is not just about delivering pictures, but about delivering data. The cloud is extremely important to our operation.” Pizzi added that NextGen TV was about delivering data both to and from the consumer and he saw the cloud serving as a collection point for this data, which could be used for rating programs and other functions. The panel then turned to the difficulty in finding qualified broadcast engineering personnel, as stations and production facilities alike move further and further into IP.
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“They aren’t making broadcast engineers anymore,” said Friedel. “The truth is that we’re really building our own, and I think everyone else is too. We try to find bright young people and we teach them. We don’t have much of a choice. “The good news is that it’s allowing us to change the diversity of our employment too,” he continued. “A lot more women are attracted to the IP industry [than to broadcasting]; the same is true of minorities too This will help us create better programming and better serve our communities.”
“I don’t believe we’ll get to a NextGen TV distribution system without moving to the cloud.” —Del Parks, Sinclair Broadcast Group The discussion ended with Goldman asking how broadcasters were faring in light of the move to streaming and away from conventional television. “Business is still pretty strong,” said Friedel, citing viewership for the recent Super Bowl. “The economics are there. We’re still delivering an audience. I hate to bring up politics, but Bloomberg is spending a lot of money in targeting his advertising, and you see his poll numbers are just skyrocketing. I don’t think this business is quite dead yet.” ■
Building a Tech Vision Meet 10 leaders laying the groundwork for the next generation of news and entertainment by George Winslow
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uch attention has been paid to the consumer technologies and digital media now disrupting the TV industry. Behind the scenes, though, there’s been an equally important revolution in the technology infrastructures that media and entertainment companies use to create and distribute content. This year’s B+C Technology Leadership Award winners have been at the forefront of that revolution, developing and deploying new technologies that promise to radically change the way TV companies operate, giving them new facilities and tools for a host of new services and business strategies. This year’s award winners were honored at the Technology Leadership Award dinner sponsored by TV Technology and Broadcasting & Cable in Atlanta on Thursday, March 5. Here are their stories.
FRED BAUMGARTNER Director, Next Gen TV Implementation, ONE Media 3.0 /Sinclair Broadcast Group Fred Baumgartner is more than a prime example of the innovative tech work that has long come out of the broadcast industry. His long and varied career in broadcasting, emergency alerting, cable, mobile and tech training also shows how tech leaders use their experience to imple-
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ment technologies like ATSC 3.0, which promises to revolutionize the over-the-air television. “I’ve been lucky enough to have had a front-row seat to many, if not most, of the advances that make up next-gen broadcasting,” said Baumgartner, working at Sinclair Broadcast Group’s ONE Media 3.0 to develop some of the first applications of ATSC 3.0. Baumgartner has held a lifelong fascination with broadcasting. At 12, he and a friend set up a radio station, which the Detroit police soon shut down. By 16, he was working at an AM radio station. After getting a bachelor’s degree in electronics education at the University of Wisconsin, he taught school for two years before moving to full-time broadcast engineering, first in radio and then in TV. He was chief engineer at a number of TV stations, including KDVR/KFCT Denver and WTTV/WTTK Indianapolis. In the early 1990s, he played a key role in the development of emergency alerting systems and published hundreds of articles and several books on radio and TV engineering. He’s also been extremely active in training at industry organizations like the Society of Broadcast Engineers, work that won him the SBE Educator of the Year Award. Rounding out that already wide ranging resume, Baumgartner was also director of engineering at the Comcast Media Center in Denver; he directed the Leitch/Harris Systems Engineering Group; and he was director of broadcast engineering for Qualcomm’s MediaFLO, a groundbreaking effort to deliver content to mobile devices. Baumgartner’s long history of innovation and wide-ranging
resume have guided his work developing new applications for ATSC 3.0. “The major value to the industry is the merging of OTT and OTA and using our advantage to wirelessly deliver content,” he said. That will create “a world of opportunity,” boosting audiences with the addition of mobile viewing and creating business opportunities with new ad revenues from “dynamic ad insertions and hyperlocalized programming,” he said.
CHRIS BLANDY Executive Vice President, Technology Solutions, Walt Disney Television One obvious example of Chris Blandy’s technology leadership in the TV industry occurred earlier this year, when his old tech teams at Fox Networks Engineering & Operations (now part of Walt Disney Television) won a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award, along with Discovery, Amazon Web Services, Evertz and SDVI, for their pioneering work in developing public cloud-based linear media supply chains. Work on issues like “linear media supply chains” may sound obscure, but it’s part of an industry-wide effort to deploy new, much more flexible technologies that will allow media companies to thrive in a digital world. “It has really been a game-changer for our operations,” Blandy said. Blandy’s fascination with new technologies began as “young boy when my dad brought home a Commodore [home computer] in the early 1980s.” At the University of Texas, Blandy studied economics but worked in technology throughout his school tenure. He learned valuable skills in digital video and multimedia while working at the school’s computer lab from 1995 to 2000. Such skills were increasingly in demand at TV operations and in 2000 he joined Fox Sports to help them build out their digital presence, which included the first webcast of a major college football game. More innovation followed as he assumed increasingly senior roles. In 2007, he led Fox’s initial tech efforts for the launch of the Hulu joint venture with NBCUniversal, and as SVP of digital media at Fox, he supervised the development of their pioneering TV everywhere initiatives. Then, as executive vice president of technical solutions at Fox Networks Engineering and Operations from October 2013 until 2019, he assumed direct responsibility for TV engineering teams, merging the digital teams into the broadcast engineering group. “That enabled us to take another look at the entire supply chain and figure out how we could leverage some of the expertise we had in software, IP and cloud technologies,” to radically rethink their operations, he said. These efforts, which recently earned a technical Emmy, “allowed us to take the best of both world, broadcast and digital,” to build new cloud and IP-based infrastructures, Blandy said. After the Disney acquisition of the 21st Century Fox properties, Blandy is continuing those efforts as executive vice president of tech-
nology solutions. “We’re keeping an eye on the future while continuing to integrate all those platforms” for the combined Disney and Fox operations, he said.
TERRI GUNNELL Executive Vice President, Monetization & Data Platforms, WarnerMedia Technology and Operations As all the major TV companies pivot their business strategies to launch direct-to-consumer subscription or ad-based video-on-demand streaming services, advanced technologies for better data analytics, monetization and advertising have become central to the industry’s success. Terri Gunnell’s success in using those technologies to strengthen traditional TV businesses and build new ones dates back to an early passion for learning new technologies. After graduating from Florida State University, she joined Turner Sports in Atlanta in 1991 as a production assistant and then moved into trafficking and scheduling ads for Turner’s networks. Here, she quickly displayed an aptitude for finding new ways to use technology to strengthen operations and businesses. All on her own, she figured out how to use the relatively primitive data software tools of the time to send reports about pricing and inventory to the ad sales team in New York. “I just always had this passion for figuring out how we could use data to make more money and make ourselves more efficient,” she recalled. That led to a 1996 promotion to join the ad sales team in New York and pioneering work on developing new technologies for managing and selling ads. In 2000, Gunnell was named director of product design and implementation for ad sales, initially overseeing the business requirements for new ad technologies and then managing both the business requirements and the engineering teams for those technologies. Those teams in 2008 created Crossroads, a custom-built trafficking system that would win a technical Emmy, and a host of other new tools for Turner’s ad sales and monetization efforts. Building on those successes, Gunnell took a series of increasingly important roles and in 2019, following AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, she was promoted to her current role, heading up data and monetization tech efforts at WarnerMedia. “One of our big focuses is on how we can use our data to power [the upcoming launch of] HBO Max,” she said. Her teams are also working with AT&T and Xandr on new ad and data analytics systems, including the development of a complete cross-platform suite of tools and the launch of national addressable advertising on WarnerMedia’s TV networks in 2021. Throughout her career, Gunnell has also focused on her tech teams, which have very low turnover, and on mentoring as a way to encourage innovation. “I’ve had the good luck of getting help in my career and I’m really a fan of taking mentoring very seriously,” she said. March 2020 :: Broadcast Engineering EXTRA
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RENARD JENKINS Former Vice President, Production, Media and Distribution Operations, PBS Technology and Operations Renard Jenkins has been a notable example of TV network tech leadership from the start of his career at CNN, where he won Emmy Awards, to PBS, where he has played central roles in the launch of PBS Kids, the creation of the PBS’s Advanced Format Center and the rollout of new content delivery infrastructures. He recently left PBS to pursue a new opportunity. Jenkins started college at Florida State University with the idea of becoming a marine biologist. He was frequently put in charge of filming ocean dives, and eventually decided to pursue his longstanding love of film, music and sound as a career. Jenkins landed at CNN in 1989. “I got there just in time for Desert Storm and I became part of an award-winning team of editors who traveled the world and put out a lot of content,” he said. CNN was “like a giant R&D playground” in those years, Jenkins recalled. This enabled him to test and play with a wide range of production equipment, skills that helped him move CNN to a file-based editing system. After a stint at Discovery Communications between 2006 and 2009, where he refreshed the company’s Technical Center, he joined TV One, where he helped design, build and then lead the network’s production facility. Since joining PBS in 2010, he helped set up PBS’s Advanced Format Center and used the R&D facility to spearhead a wide range of pioneering work with stations, vendors and manufacturers on the creation and distribution of VR/AR, 4K, high dynamic range (HDR), new audio systems and other formats. “We really want to get an understanding of where these things are going to land,” Jenkins said. Jenkins has also been playing a central role in the development of PBS’s next generation of media supply chains and content delivery systems, which will move the network and stations to cloud and IP-based infrastructures. It’s already helping public broadcasters quickly launch new services, such as the recent rollout of PBS stations on YouTube TV. But Jenkins, who has won a number of awards for his work over the years, said he is most proud to have been the technical lead on the launch of PBS Kids. “It touches our youth and our most vulnerable children and gives them a space to learn and grow,” he said. “That means a lot to me.”
AARON LABERGE Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, The Walt Disney Co., Direct-to-Consumer & International Aaron LaBerge’s long list of innovative tech efforts run the gamut from the launch of sports websites and early work on the internet delivery of sports clips, to pioneering mobile offerings and the recent launch of Disney+. LaBerge is also a notable example of how executives with a back-
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ground in software, computers and digital are revolutionizing the TV industry. Those skills would ultimately lead to his getting the job as chief technology officer at ESPN — only the second in company history — and to his current role, with responsibility for the technology vision and strategy of Disney’s direct-to-consumer and international efforts. “I think a lot of people think of Disney as being a content company,” LaBerge said. “We are certainly a master storyteller that is all about our characters and experience, but the earliest days of Disney and the earliest days of ESPN, it’s always been about a marriage of content and technology, and I think that is even more true today.” LaBerge became fascinated with the web and computer software while studying engineering at the University of South Carolina and after school went to work in software engineering, joining Starwave in 1997, which was involved in pioneering web work for the likes of ESPN. com, NBA.com, NFL.com and others. “We created the first version of ESPN.com and found a way to automatically load scores to the website,” he recalled. After The Walt Disney Co. acquired Starwave in 1998, LaBerge joined Disney Interactive and then ESPN, overseeing tech teams on a number of pioneering projects, including early efforts to put video clips on the website and the launch of ESPN’s mobile product in 2005. “Rethinking the workflows for that project laid the foundation for our later mobile efforts today, where we continue to be a leader,” he said. After a stint as the co-founder of software company Fanzter, he returned to ESPN in 2015 as only its second CTO. In that role, he used his digital background to revamp traditional TV operations. He assumed his current role in 2018, following Disney’s acquisition of the 21st Century Fox cable and studio assets, overseeing the technological vision and tech teams at the Direct-to-Consumer & International division. Those efforts have already led to the successful launch of Disney+, which has racked up nearly 29 million subscribers as of the end of January. “We’ve integrated the 20th Century Fox team and we are creating a truly global organization so that everything we do is not just domestic, but global,” he said.
STEPHANIE LONE Senior Vice President, Engineering, CBS Sports Digital and CBS Interactive While live sports is one of the most popular types of online content, it’s also one of the most difficult to deliver. Consumers expect streaming services to provide the high quality video they’ve long demanded from broadcasters and cable networks. That imperative makes Stephanie Lone’s lengthy career at CBS Interactive and CBS Sports Digital particularly noteworthy, given that the innovative technologies developed by her teams now deliver a mindboggling 30,000-plus live streaming events each year, as well as a host of other services from fantasy sports to breaking news. Much of this was built on an early fascination with tech and new media. As a kid, Lone recalls playing games on computers and
learning how to code improved versions of them. While earning a bachelor’s degree at North Carolina State University from 1989 to 1993, she was so fascinated with multimedia applications she convinced her professors to let her put together a multidisciplinary course of study with an emphasis on multimedia. After graduating, she started her own company focused on multimedia, animation and design that began working for SportsLine. SportsLine acquired her company in 1997 and was in turn acquired by Viacom in 2004. At CBS Interactive, Lone has held a series of increasingly senior roles, including a promotion to vice president of core data services in 2007, vice president of ad revenue systems in 2008 and vice president of shared platforms in 2010. Armed with that wide-ranging expertise in digital media, she moved back to sports in 2014, first as vice president of engineering at CBS Sports Digital and then in her current role in 2019, where her teams have developed pioneering cloud-based workflows. “By executing the majority of the workflows in the cloud, we’ve been able to deliver very high-quality video with low latency for very high-profile events like the Super Bowls,” she said. At the same time, her team has used cloud-based workflows to successfully spin up new services like CBS Sports HQ and deliver an ever-growing roster of live events. “The digital transformation we did 18 months ago now allows us to execute over 30,000 live events in the cloud,” she said, which in turn has made CBSI more efficient and flexible. “It allows us to deliver the best possible experience to the consumer.” She credits that success to her teams. “We wouldn’t be achieving what we’ve done if we didn’t have this fantastic team of people,” Lone said.
JEFF MAYZURK Senior Vice President of Operations and Technology, NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises Jeff Mayzurk joins this year’s class of Technology Leadership Award winners after years of innovative work, most notably in overseeing the design and construction of the Telemundo Center in Miami, a facility that employs groundbreaking internet protocol and cloud technologies. As with some other 2020 award winners who’ve brought innovation from newer media into the TV industry, Mayzurk developed an early fascination with computing and software. By age 10, he was playing around with computers. After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin in 1996, he started working in software development at companies like CNET, which in those days was heavily involved in creating tools for publishing content to the web. CNET had a joint venture with E! to launch Eonline.com and when CNET sold its stake, Mayzurk moved to Los Angeles to work for the cable network. That led to increasingly senior tech positions at E! and then at Comcast, as it acquired E! and expanded its cable-network portfolio. “It was a time when the media and entertainment indus-
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tries that had been based on bespoke hardware were becoming more software oriented,” Mayzurk recalled. “That opened up some interesting opportunities for people like me to apply new technologies to solve problems.” In the early 2000s, Mayzurk and his teams developed an innovative and much less costly way to launch international networks for E! that involved internet delivery. In 2009, after Comcast announced plans to acquire NBCUniversal, Mayzurk led the tech teams overseeing transition planning. Post-merger, as general manager of West Coast Technical Operations, he led the creation of an innovative 150,000-squarefoot broadcast center on the Universal Studios lot, which boosted innovation and efficiency by bringing a wide range of operations into one facility. Building on that experience, Mayzurk was then charged with radically rethinking the company’s operations with the design and build of the Telemundo Center in Miami. When it went live in 2019, the 500,000-square-foot facility featured an all IP-infrastructure that puts 13 studios and five production control rooms on one unified infrastructure capable of creating and processing over 4,000 hours of original production per year for sports, news, entertainment, scripted drama and digital. “The scale of the facility and the collaboration and innovation that it creates between different parts of the business and our tech teams would have been impossible with traditional TV infrastructures,” Mayzurk said.
NEIL MAZUR Vice President of Engineering & Operations, WAGA Atlanta For some tech leaders like Neil Mazur, you quickly get the sense that technology isn’t just a tool for improving broadcasting. It’s also something they’ve loved all their lives. “I was always fascinated by radio and broadcasting,” recalled Mazur, who earned his amateur radio license at the age of 13 and was working at a local AM radio station by 16. After graduating with a degree in electrical engineering from Lafayette College, he landed a job at New York’s WNEW-TV (now Fox-owned WNYW), where he quickly impressed his bosses working on the night shift. “I was getting a lot of equipment repaired at night and after about a year, they asked me to join them as a manager.” In 1990, he moved to KCAL Los Angeles, where he worked his way up to director of engineering in his last two years before taking the top engineering job at WAGA Atlanta. At the Fox-owned station, he’s earned a well-deserved reputation for building impressive tech teams and finding new ways to improve news operations. For example, two of his most recent directors of engineering have gone on to the top engineering job at other Fox-owned stations. WAGA produces 70 hours a week of local news, with a relatively modest tech staff. “There are very few stations in the country that produce that amount of news,” Mazur said, crediting his tech teams with
finding ways to operate extremely efficiently. We have two people [on the tech and operations team] running our news shows in addition to a producer,” he noted. “There are still a lot of stations that claim to be automated that will have five or six people doing that.” Notably, WAGA began experimenting with tethered drones in 2014 as part of a larger effort to use drones by Fox Television Stations and Fox News. In September 2016, WAGA’s Doug Evans and Mazur, who has a Federal Aviation Administration license to fly helicopters, got their Part 107 FAA license to fly drones. Over time, the “Fox Flight Team” at the stations and Fox News have flown several thousand flights, including about 1,000 flights in the last half of 2019. “It has really allowed us to get footage and tell news stories that we wouldn’t have been able to any other way,” Mazur said.
LISA PEDROGO Vice President of NY Engineering & Strategic Initiatives, WarnerMedia Technology and Operations News organizations have been scrambling to meet consumer demand for more video on more platforms as the news cycle speeds up during the run-up to the 2020 elections. That makes Lisa Pedrogo’s work overseeing the building of a new all-internet protocol (IP) facility for CNN at New York City’s Hudson Yards particularly notable. Election season can be a trying time for engineers, Pedrogo noted, because traditional infrastructures make it difficult for them to quickly launch new offerings or speed up the delivery of news to consumers. “We constantly need to be able to respond to developments with products that look professional but don’t take six months of ordering and installing equipment,” she said. “Going all-IP [at Hudson Yards] enables us to do more of what we want to do as we make the transition from a hardware environment to a software environment where more and more of the equipment and infrastructure is going into the cloud.” The Hudson Yards operation, with 110,000 square feet of technical space, went live in 2019 but its creation was built on years of innovation by the tech teams at CNN and Pedrogo’s long experience with building innovative news projects. Pedrogo, who still remembers being blown away by a visit to a TV studio at age 4, readily admits that she’s always fascinated by the medium. After studying communications at Hofstra University, she went to work as a production assistant at CNN’s business news network in 1989. There, she quickly picked up new skills and technologies, rising to director of operations at CNNfn in 1996. When veteran business anchor Lou Dobbs left CNN, she followed him into the digital world to assist on the 1999 launch of Space.com. After gaining valuable experience at the e-commerce and video website, she then returned to CNN, where she played a key role in the construction of a number of innovative facilities. She was project manager for CNN’s Time Warner Center studio build in 2002, then the CNN HD network launch and the rebuilding of various bureaus. In 2008, she
was put in charge of technical training programs. Looking back, Pedrogo said she’s proud not only of the projects she has managed, but the teams that have built those facilities. “I’m not an engineer but I manage engineering teams,” she said. “In doing that, I’m most passionate about leading teams to their best … and most proud of my ability to handle change and to coach people through change.”
BLAKE SABATINELLI CEO, Newsy With all the controversies over fake and partisan news, Newsy CEO Blake Sabatinelli joins the 2020 award winners for the work his teams have done in finding innovative ways to deliver fact-based news over multiple platforms. “I was always the kid who was trying to learn how to code,” Sabatinelli recalled, noting that he was building websites for people by age 15. After graduating from Florida Atlantic University, he worked as a software and web developer before taking a job as an online producer and editor for WFTS Tampa-St. Petersburg in 2007. After working his way up to executive producer of new media, he moved to WJLA Washington in 2012 and to E.W. Scripps as director of digital solutions in 2014. Sabatinelli was put in charge of Newsy in 2015, after it was acquired by Scripps. By that time, Newsy had established a reputation for technical innovation. Launched in 2008 by media entrepreneur Jim Spencer in partnership with the University of Missouri, the streaming service focused on delivering news to mobile phones. It won accolades for its popular app and innovative production techniques for turning out news clips for its own service and a variety of clients, such as Time Inc. Following the acquisition, Sabatinelli pushed to expand Newsy’s innovative product development efforts while strengthening its financial prospects. After seeing longer viewing times on Roku, he worked to beef up Newsy’s focus on streaming content to smart TV devices just as that market started to take off. Meanwhile, his tech teams deployed an innovative dynamic ad insertion platform to better monetize news streams. “It was the right bet and being a first mover in that space, along with CBSN, has been very helpful,” he said. To further expand its reach, Newsy has launched a 24-hour cable channel while developing apps for a wide variety of streaming devices. “The opportunity to own a channel is an opportunity for us to be ubiquitous,” he said. “It is about being available for news consumers wherever they want to watch.” Newsy also won kudos and awards for its long-form documentary programming and fact-based approach to the news. “You won’t see opinion hosts or pundits arguing with each other on Newsy,” Sabatinelli said. “You’ll see a reporter and video providing that information in a way that is meant to be informative and thoughtprovoking.” ■ Originally appeared in B&C. March 2020 :: Broadcast Engineering EXTRA
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