David R. Busse
Well-known member
I won't tie this to the "banned from the sidelines" thread earlier, but the whole discussion brings up some side issues that might be of interest in this forum. To wit...
-Wiring of sports venues. Most modern sports venues are pre-wired in some form, allowing easier electronic media access for on-the-field pre- and postgame remotes, etc. The ones that are not (Rose Bowl, LA Coloseum, others) are legendary pains-in-the butt for us to do our work, forcing monster cable runs and huge amounts of manhours for setup and teardown. What's the situation in your locale?
I bring this up because of the SF Giants PacBell Park model, which I fear may slowly make it's way to modern stadia everywhere. The Giants turned over pre-wiring of the new stadium to a third-party vendor, who owns the finished electronic facilities. So, think of it as a toll road. Want an on-field remote, via your sat truck outside the building (or fiber tie-in, or m/w or whatever)...it'll cost you something like $300 a day to tap into their system to get your camera on the field. Need IFB along with that...another charge ($100 or something like that) for hard-line phone to the camera position.
This may answer the question you ask during the baseball season this year..."Why do we just see 'outside the ballpark' shots from San Francisco...?"
I understand (no firsthand knowledge) theres a similar setup at Yankee Stadium, tho there may also be a union jurisdictional element there.
Now, you say "...but my local stadium has been prewired for years...all we do is hook the truck into a box at the curb, and hook the camera and mic up to any number of inside boxes and get instant live shots from inside...and our station's engineers did it..."
Enter the wonderful world of HD. When your station converts to HD, you can forget pushing an HD signal thru more than about 25 feet of standard coax. You'll need to replace those stadium runs with pricey fiber. Is your station gonna do it, is the ballpark owner gonna do it, or is a third party gonna do it and charge for each use, a la SFO? Just something to think about, but this is another access issue that may creep up on you and take you by surprise. Fiber can transmit many video and audio signals thru one tiny glass pipe. So the expense of wiring with pricey glass could be borne by all the stations in your market. This takes coordination...
-Wiring of sports venues. Most modern sports venues are pre-wired in some form, allowing easier electronic media access for on-the-field pre- and postgame remotes, etc. The ones that are not (Rose Bowl, LA Coloseum, others) are legendary pains-in-the butt for us to do our work, forcing monster cable runs and huge amounts of manhours for setup and teardown. What's the situation in your locale?
I bring this up because of the SF Giants PacBell Park model, which I fear may slowly make it's way to modern stadia everywhere. The Giants turned over pre-wiring of the new stadium to a third-party vendor, who owns the finished electronic facilities. So, think of it as a toll road. Want an on-field remote, via your sat truck outside the building (or fiber tie-in, or m/w or whatever)...it'll cost you something like $300 a day to tap into their system to get your camera on the field. Need IFB along with that...another charge ($100 or something like that) for hard-line phone to the camera position.
This may answer the question you ask during the baseball season this year..."Why do we just see 'outside the ballpark' shots from San Francisco...?"
I understand (no firsthand knowledge) theres a similar setup at Yankee Stadium, tho there may also be a union jurisdictional element there.
Now, you say "...but my local stadium has been prewired for years...all we do is hook the truck into a box at the curb, and hook the camera and mic up to any number of inside boxes and get instant live shots from inside...and our station's engineers did it..."
Enter the wonderful world of HD. When your station converts to HD, you can forget pushing an HD signal thru more than about 25 feet of standard coax. You'll need to replace those stadium runs with pricey fiber. Is your station gonna do it, is the ballpark owner gonna do it, or is a third party gonna do it and charge for each use, a la SFO? Just something to think about, but this is another access issue that may creep up on you and take you by surprise. Fiber can transmit many video and audio signals thru one tiny glass pipe. So the expense of wiring with pricey glass could be borne by all the stations in your market. This takes coordination...