Fiber Optic Video News and Perspective

One of our clients here in Boston is NESN (New England Sports Network) who are a very progressive, all HD regional sports network that broadcasts the Boston Red Sox and Boston Bruins. NESN is unique in that their entire connectivity is accomplished over dark fiber from their headquarters in Watertown MA to Fenway Park, the Bank North Garden, and their uplink facility in Needham, MA. They needed to add an additional uncompressed 1080i program return from master control to the Garden for the Bruins Sky Suite feeds to minimize latency. All the dark fibers were in use over this 24 mile run.

Our choice was to take the existing program return fiber, add CWDM multiplexing and run both return feeds on the same strand, taking advantage of our newest 6292 series digital video cards. The 6000 series gives an end-to-end performance increase of about 6db over the 5000 series. Two new TX6292 transmitters and a four channel CWDM mux replaced the original program return module in Master Control. At the Garden, the incoming fiber arrives at the mezzanine level studio connecting first to the CWDM mux. The program return feed then goes to a two way splitter; one leg to the studio receiver and the other to a house fiber which takes the signal to the truck bay. 

The separate Garden return feed from the CWDM was also connected to a house fiber which brought the signal to the Garden frame room where the new receive module was installed to feed the HD video to the flat screens in the Sky Suites. No more three second delay between the hockey game in front of you and the picture on the flat screens.

So what about this title referring to tigers? When we got to the 

Garden we discovered it was also load-in day for the Ringling Brothers Circus. Garden staff and big signs warned us to “stay off  level #3” where the animals were in their cages. In our travels around the Garden to install and test, we made sure we routed well away from the “Land of Big Cats”. However, when we were working at the NESN studio above on Mezzanine level #5, all we ever heard were a couple yipping little dogs who were on the same level as the big animals. It must have been time for a CatNap. (GROAN)