VENUE SPOTLIGHT > Q&A JEFF VOLK Alpha Video, VP Besides IP and HDR, what other trends are influencing venue renovation or construction? We continue to see that either the venue or the control room is also being tasked as a live television production facility. Venues are also constructing multiple control rooms. Long gone are the days of having a singular control room that produces video board shows. It’s a facility with multiple control rooms that control multiple venues, whether from an LED in-venue show perspective, or from a television or online broadcast perspective. There’s also a lot more infrastructure planning, both in-venue and between the venues. Those projects have become far more complex in nature. How are these trends affecting the college sports market? In the college space, even with the all of the work that’s been done by ACC schools for the ACC Network launch this month, all of those systems, to the best of my knowledge, are all basebands. And so I think pretty much every single one of them is 1080p60 baseband capable. IP today still represents, in terms of money, about a 25% increase in costs. IP was not really a budgetary reality for a lot of the
JUSTO GUTIERREZ Diversified, Director, AV and Sound
STUART REYNOLDS Diversified, Director, Sports and Live Events ho are some teams that are pushing the W immersion envelope? SR: We’re starting to see the joining of primary sports facilities to what I might call live entertainment adjunct facilities. For instance, a Ballpark Village at Busch Stadium, Wrigleyville at Wrigley Field, Texas Live for the new Globe Life Park. These adjunct facilities are meant to extend the fans’ stay within the ballpark or stadium environment. Teams are trying to find a way to get the fan to the venue earlier, give them a reason to stay longer, and keep them connected to what’s going on at the main venue. When we were working with the St. Louis Cardinals on Busch Stadium’s production room, we were also working on all of the fiber transmission gear to get a signal over to the Ballpark Village [in order to] encompass all of the real-time data going on at the ballpark.
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customers as they were looking to ramp up their ACC Network facilities. How are systems integrators offsetting the difficulties of IP for college programs? There are also some additional challenges because [IP] is still an evolving and developing technology that can be challenging to deploy, but more importantly, challenging to maintain. On the ACC Network and the SEC Network, I would say 75 to 80% of those schools have hired full-time engineers since there’s a lot more involved in supporting an IP facility than there is a baseband facility. [Hiring these engineers] is mixed with the costs, newness, and occasional difficulties of deploying complex IP systems. In addition, there is quite an education process that we typically go through with our customers to better understand their needs so that we can then educate them on what the best course of action moving forward for them might be. [Sometimes], customers are adamant that they need to go IP, and after a further evaluation of their needs, we land that probably perhaps 1080p60 baseband is likely their best scenario. Much like when there was a transition from SD to HD or some of the other things that have happened in time with the industry, there’s still a tremendous amount of education that goes into it. — Kristian Hernandez <
How are these entertainment districts capturing the different interests of fans? SR: Since fans come for the social experience as much as they do for the game experience, we began to look at [venues] as an overall entertainment space. For instance, the new Atlanta Braves facility is designed to be so friendly to various demographics. They’re there for the ballgame, but you’ve got a zip line and so many cool things to do from a family perspective. There’s something to engage everybody. JG: On another side, all of the major sports are contending with all of the entertainment options that everybody has outside of sports. Organizations are also trying to create environments that will actually draw people to the stadiums. I’m one of those traditional fans that just want to sit with a beer and a hot dog and keep score at a baseball game because that’s what I love doing. There’s still a segment of fans across all sports that are like that, but there are many more now that are going to be distracted by other things. They would rather go do [some other activity] than pay money to go to a stadium, unless there’s a concert on the entry plaza before the game, or there’s fireworks night, and there’s all these bars, clubs, and restaurants that you can go to right after you leave the stadium. So, that’s the other piece of this. Team owners are trying to figure out how to get people there and keep them there for the dollars that go beyond just the tickets of the game. — KH <