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Indiana – July 24, 2024
The main video switching and graphics station within one of the control rooms at IU-Bloomington’s Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media & Technology.
Meeting Topic: Inside the Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media & Technology at IU-Bloomington
Moderator Name: Brett Leonard
Speaker Name: Kevin Evans, Danny French, Nathan Miller, and Brock Hamman, IU Radio-TV Services
Meeting Location: Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
Summary
Indiana University Radio-TV Services welcomed the Indiana section of the AES to tour the Mark Cuban Center for Sports Media and Technology’s control rooms within the storied Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, the home of the IU Bloomington basketball dynasty. After years of fly-pack setup for basketball season and special events, the University’s Radio-TV Services were allocated space to construct dedicated control rooms within the building. The facility’s design goals were to streamline production for broadcast and recording, as well as video wall production, as well as uniting a variety of different campus facilities at a central hub.
The primary venue serviced by these control rooms is the Assembly Hall itself, where basketball games are covered by roughly eight cameras and some 20-30 mics. The production’s outputs, however, are somewhat more complex. Feeds from the control rooms feed streaming on the Big Ten Network, campus TV, radio, venue concourse video monitors, as well as the arena’s video boards. These productions require the crafting of several unique audio mixes and video cuts. The staff, overseen by at least one staff engineer-in-charge, but often employs a full compliment of student workers in roles from on-screen graphics to video replay and camera shading.
The facility’s unique technical features center around a robust central fiber network. Fiber interconnection runs throughout Assembly Hall, offering an array of Dante interconnection options, as well as tie-in to feeds from the house PA system. The Dante network is currently manually configured, but upcoming upgrades will include implementation of Dante Domain Manager, allowing for greater control over access levels for student engineers. Video is run on SMTPE 2022, with provisions in place for updates to SMPTE 2110. Similarly, intercoms are run over a dedicated portion of the same network. This network is also patchable to a variety of dedicated fiber and triax interconnection to the broadcast truck pad often used by networks broadcasting notable games and tournaments, allowing for easy interconnection and sharing of feeds. The fiber network also connects to other notable venues across campus with 100 Gigabit trunk lines, allowing these control room facilities to function for any variety of events across campus. A central machine room between the two control rooms offers hard patching between remote venues and these control rooms, as well as the IU Radio-TV studios across campus.
Written By: Brett Leonard
