International. Avid's comprehensive tools and workflow solutions for creating, distributing and optimizing media played a key role during FOX Sports' coverage of Super Bowl LI on Feb. 5 at Houston's NRG Stadium.
Avid's solutions enabled FOX Sports to facilitate collaboration between production teams located more than a thousand miles away, give all publishers immediate access to the images they needed, and created a virtual reality experience for viewers.
FOX Sports faced a number of challenges for the broadcast of one of the most anticipated and technologically advanced events of the year. I had to generate multiple hours of programming, over several days, for many different networks. To do so efficiently, their production teams needed to collaborate from hundreds of miles away, manage large volumes of images, and engage viewers across multiple viewing platforms with immersive content.
The channel turned to Avid to solve these critical needs with fast, efficient and collaborative workflows based on the MediaCentral® platform, the industry's most open, tightly integrated and efficient platform designed for media.
"Every year, the Super Bowl continues to grow as we try to offer the viewer a better experience. Avid solutions are a key part of our workflow. Every piece of content that is created or terminated on the site touches Avid shared storage. And Avid iNEWS® helps us collaboratively plan and manage our live programs, giving them access to the same information at the same time, no matter where they are in the world," said Kevin Callahan, vice president of Field Operations for FOX Sports.
The channel has leveraged Avid's flexible deployment options to connect all of its iNEWS systems so that everything is shared in a degraded system and updated in real time, allowing geographically dispersed teams to collaborate more efficiently, facilitating the transmission of events such as the Super Bowl and NASCAR races.
Avid shared media storage is at the heart of FOX Sports' file-based workflows. With 320TB of storage supporting 25 simultaneous clients, it acts as the central repository for all FOX Sports editing systems, including 27TB of archival historical material for the two teams, giving all publishers access to content in a shared work environment.
