Posted by Paul Kamp
Boston College’s Conte Forum and Alumni Stadium are now enhanced for HD sports television by SMPTE Fiber. The tapeless HD workflow enables them to deliver live HD video to giant-screen display boards in Alumni Stadium and Conte Forum.
The BC athletics department designed the a new facility with Little Bay Broadcast. The Sports Video Group recently published an article with a bit more detail on the system.
It is a great application of fiber to HD for Sports Video for a stadium and arena. It enables the fans to keep an Eagle Eye things.
Posted by Rich Cerny
Our recent success with Trio Video at Tennessee’s
Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival reminds me that August 2009 marks the 15th anniversary of Woodstock ’94, which was the 25th anniversary of the festival that changed the world.
Telecast wasn’t around in 1969, since Corning didn’t invent low loss optical waveguide until the early 1970’s, and Valtec didn’t introduce the first single mode fiber cable until 1976. But in 1994, we were just introducing the
Adder when Polygram Records asked us to create the fiber optic infrastructure for Woodstock II. We jumped at the chance.
What young company wouldn’t want to participate in something like that? We turned it into a working party. Telecast made a company outing out of this, and everyone in the company got weekend backstage passes, sleeping in the RV or tents. By day, we all were supporting the fiber network between North and South stages and to the TV uplink compound. We supplied the Tac-4 cables, which Ace Audiovisual from NYC strung up on poles, and the Adders for Audio and the Vipers for Video (alliterative, aren’t we!).
We printed up multicolored tie dye t-shirts (“Official Lightpipe Gurus” and “2 more days of Love, Peace and Fiber Optics”), which we gave to the crew and dignitaries, including Al Roker and Larry “Bud” Melman (Calvert DeForest). With an audience of 350,000 people, plenty of rain and mud and not much in the way of sanitary facilities, it was clearly a mess, and we were very happy to be backstage. Yet the music was great, the sound was awesome and the event was an artistic and cultural success.
Since Woodstock, Adder audio multiplexers have become the centerpieces of your major sports broadcast productions, and we have continued to serve the pro audio community and keep our product performance keenly honed. They’re also used to broadcast our country’s top leaders and provide audio for many other high profile facilities and customers. Adders provide AV and broadcast audio for the
New Yankee Stadium, as well as sound reinforcement in opera houses and theaters around
the world. They are even used in recording studios. In 2004, Tony Bennett and k.d. lang’s CD, “
A Wonderful World”, won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. It was recorded using a Telecast 64 channel Adder system.
Over the last 15 years since Woodstock ’94,
Adders have evolved. They have greater capacity, more modularity, slicker remote gain and monitoring features and even better sound than ever before.
They’ve been around the block and paid their dues. There are a lot of imitators out there these days, some even trying to name their products like ours, but there is only one authentic Adder family, and it stands apart from all the rest.
Posted by Rich Cerny
In AVI-SPL's corporate blog, Jim Stokes, author of Pride of the 
Yankees, mentions the $5.7 million dollar contract for the Bronx Bomber AV project. Download Jim's complete article from Sound & Communications Magazine to see how Telecast is central to the new stadium's HD-broadcast fiber optic video and audio production.
Excerpt: "...transporting HDTV (SDI) signals over the significant distances of a sporting venue required implementation of fiberoptic transport systems
to maintain full signal integrity. Telecast Systems (Worcester MA) products provided much of the fiber transport (audio and video) used to achieve the many requirements associated with transporting video and audio signals to and from the broadcasters.
Audio and video are evident throughout the fan areas.
Benefits Of Fiber
Looking at the fundamental attributes of fiber, McConnell said, “It starts to become difficult to push video around on such long cable runs of 1200, 1500, 1800 feet to maintain HD integrity. It’s really better to transport it over fiber and keep that signal kind of pristine and revert it back to copper for somebody to use at the opposite end.”
Here’s more in-depth information regarding spfx. According to McConnell, each in-Stadium radio booth, along with the television production truck parking areas, is provided with house feeds and effects, including crowd and the aforementioned field effects and crowd noise: up to 48 various discrete feeds over a single fiber, through implementation of the Telecast Systems Fiber Transport.
In addition, the broadcaster is served analog audio in the familiar analog XLR configuration. Input into the Telecast system itself is achieved with A/D converters located throughout the Stadium near the sources, which include dugouts for effects and the PA booth for house feeds, among other source areas. The system provides the benefit of a robust distribution system for effects without the need for analog distribution amplifiers and the lengthy multiple cable counts to all locations.
Summing up, McConnell noted, “The successful outcome of a project is truly the culmination of many things visible, such as the excellent craftsmanship of those performing the work, and invisible, like those who design, engineer and plan the work well away from the jobsite itself. Although hundreds of personnel were involved over several years, it yielded to a single day when the networks arrived and interconnected their equipment for a broadcast, and the word is spread: ‘The cameras have fired and we have audio.’ Speakers are mounted behind the frieze. Play ball!”
Posted by Rich Cerny
Save a million on your athletic facilities, how? A really easy way is to share one control room among big screens in your stadium and arenas, rather than building individual ones in each venue. All it takes is a powerful fiber infrastructure, at a fraction of the cost.
Let's meet to discuss how we helped big and small schools alike; schools like Nebraska, Michigan State, Stanford, Texas A&M, Florida State, Central Florida, Alabama and dozens of others.
On June 9th and 10th college and university video professionals, along with their
conference, television, and online partners, will come together for the
first-annual College Sports Video Summit (CSVS), 
held June 9-10 at the
Westin Peachtree Plaza hotel in downtown Atlanta. You will hear presentations and meet professionals from colleges, universities and sports networks.
We'll have a tabletop display there to show you how this gear works and how simple it is to install and operate. Please come and see us at this event that addresses College Sports Video like no other.