Telecast Helps NESN Televise WEEI Sports Radio
Posted by Steve DeFrancesco
By Steve DeFrancesco
Our gear is used for a wide variety of applications, but the installation at NESN is noteworthy for its cost-effective use of our technology to repurpose a valuable asset and produce television programming that literally didn’t exist previously..jpg)
For eight years, NESN (New England Sports Network) has depended on Telecast Fiber Systems' fiber-optic transceiver technology for its local television coverage of the Boston Red Sox and Bruins games as well as collegiate sports on a cable network that serves four million homes in six New England States.
Beginning last November, however, NESN partnered with WEEI Sports Radio in Boston to break new ground in combining radio and television media and experiment with remote-controlled fiber optic technology.
WEEI, one of the most successful sports radio talk stations in America, now does video simulcasts of the “Dennis and Callahan Morning Show” each weekday from 6 to 9 a.m. It’s 
aired live on NESN in New England and later in prime time across the country to 3.7 million viewers on NESN National.
This unique programming partnership brings together the two most popular sports media companies in New England in ways that complement the strengths of each organization. It—and other experiments like it throughout the nation—may signal a new trend in combining the power of media assets.
For the show, NESN installed four remotely controlled Sony BRC-H700 HD cameras with pan/tilt/zoom mechanisms connected to Telecast Fiber’s bi-directional 5400-series POV remote camera systems in WEEI's studio in Brighton, Mass. The POV system allows video, audio, monitor return, a genlock signal and duplex data for the pan-tilt-zoom camera control to be combined and transported on the single fiber connection.
Dark fiber supplied by Sidera Networks feeds video signals back to the NESN HD Television Center in Watertown, Mass. In the Watertown control room, NESN directs and switches the four video feeds and add graphics, finishing the program. No personnel is needed at WEEI during the recording. In the morning, before each show, the crew simply makes contact with the WEEI staff through the intercom system.
“The WEEI video link has been fantastic,” said Dave Desrochers, vice president of engineering for NESN. “It has been a technical success from day one. We are doing the show from an actual radio studio and it looks like a radio show on TV which is the look we were going for.”
In addition to its WEEI show, NESN uses fiber for its game coverage, pre-game shows and press conferences. It uses Telecast Fiber’s Viper I, Viper II and Adder II modular audio/video systems to send uncompressed HD and audio feeds plus a combination of Ethernet, and analog signals on fiber. Recently, during the Boston Bruins Stanley Cup championship, NESN used Telecast Rattlers to go live from multiple locations throughout the TD Garden facility.