By Sid Stanley, Calrec, General Manager
Thursday, January 16, 2025 – 11:51 am
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With a capacity of 83,000, next month’s NFL Super Bowl takes place at the prestigious Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, but if last year’s record-breaking viewing figures are anything to go by, the real audience numbers will be through the roof.
Thanks to the widespread adoption of streamed media, the 2024 Super Bowl numbers broke all previous records, with more than 200 million viewers watching all or part of the game across all networks. It was the highest unduplicated total audience in history, and it wasn’t just down to Taylor Swift’s hugely anticipated appearance at the game. Not entirely anyway.
US sports has always been big business. According to a 2023 study by American think tank the Pew Research Center, 38 percent of US adults follow professional or college sports;16 percent describe themselves as committed fans and 7 percent as “superfans”, people who follow sports very closely and talk about them every single day.
Increasingly, college sports are taking a bigger slice of the pie. The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is the largest governing body in college athletics in the US and oversees sports programs at colleges and universities across the country. In its 2022/23 fiscal year it generated more than US$1.2 billion in revenue, and according to research from Morones Analytics, TV broadcast rights are by far the biggest single source of revenue for college sports.
In fact, the percentage of revenue that television rights drive into the collegiate system has grown from 21percent in 2009 to 31percent in 2022. The “Power 5”, the college sports networks considered to be the most influential in the NCAA, generated a combined US $3.55 billion in the 2022-23 fiscal year, bolstering the coffers of each member college with tens of millions of dollars every year. Made up of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), the Big Ten Conference (Big Ten), the Big 12 Conference (Big 12), the Southeastern Conference (SEC), and the Pac-12 Network (which has lost 10 of its 12 members to other conferences this season), these networks deal with both traditional broadcast partners like ESPN, CBS Sports, Fox Sports and NBC Sports as well as DTC channels like Peacock, ESPN+ and TNT to not only generate engagement, but to deliver content to the very best broadcast standards.
All this is very much in Calrec’s playbook. The first college to agree to a television deal for coverage of its athletic program was the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, inking a deal with NBC back in 1991. More recently, Calrec’s work with the University means the college is still rewriting the rulebook. Following an upgrade to its Notre Dame Studios complex, the school’s production facility is one of only a few in the world that is all IP. Its Rex and Alice A. Martin Media Center houses a Calrec Artemis, Type R surface and an ImPulse core to provide hockey broadcasts to NBC’s Peacock streaming service as well as around 125 athletic contests to the ACC Network. But while it enables the university to create and deliver live content at scale, it’s also advantageous for the students on campus.
“Our system benefits the whole University, not just athletics,” said Carl Cathcart, Video Engineer at Notre Dame Studios, in an SVG article published in March 2024. “With I/O boxes strategically placed across campus, we have flexibility in covering events and we’re even training students on how to use the consoles. They produce some of our streamed games; it’s a part time paid job for them and they’re gaining valuable, real-world experience in professional audio.”
Notre Dame is not alone; when ESPN helped create the ACC in 2019, Calrec was already on its spec list, and Calrec works with multiple colleges across the US to develop their broadcast coverage.
The University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill is a member of the ACC Network and produces up to 200 broadcasts a year from its three on-campus control rooms. UNC also works with ESPN2, ESPNU and other ESPN platforms, provides International Field Hockey Pro League to 40 countries, and delivers content for on-demand access and social media.
Working with Calrec to design a flexible infrastructure it operates three audio protocols simultaneously: IP, Dante and Calrec’s Hydra2. This gives UNC the flexibility to handle multiple I/O types depending on the requirements of each sport and venue, and it enabled them to step up during Covid to produce full football coverage directly for ESPN. And like Notre Dame, it’s not only the sports fans who benefit.
“We’re trying to build a very robust student program here, bringing in our students on campus to learn television production,” said Ken Cleary, UNC’s Associate Athletic Director, in an SVG article. “We want to teach students how things work in the real world. If they’re going to work in a broadcast facility for a major network or in a TV truck, we want them to see the same equipment that they’d see in those environments. Although we could probably make a smaller console work for a lot of what we do it’s not necessarily training students how the real world operates. That was a major driving factor for us.”
With four Brio consoles, a Summa and an Artemis, Florida’s Full Sail University students are also taking advantage of industry-standard kit, working across multiple degree programs including its Sportscasting Degree. The Artemis and Brio combo gives Full Sail Live different options of how to use the system. It also supports many different protocols including analogue, AES, MADI, Waves Soundgrid and Dante, which is important as the venue works in a mixed protocol environment.
Vince Lepore is a Full Sale graduate whose team managed two of the school’s on-campus live event production facilities, including the largest collegiate esports arena in the country, The Full Sail University Orlando Health Fortress.
At the time of the installation, Vince Lepore, Director, Event Technical Operations, Full Sail University said, “It’s a total game changer for us as far as being able to distribute I/O around the facility. We have the new system connected to our video router through a number of different MADI ports, which is tremendously helpful for being able to embed and de-embed audio off of our router. That was something we were unable to do before and that’s given us a lot more flexibility. We can also now have several consoles across campus connected over the Hydra2 network — not just within the performance venue, but over the entire campus.”
From Husson University’s New England School of Communications (NESCom) in Maine, to producing live sports at the University of Oklahoma’s Department of Intercollegiate Athletics, Colleges are also taking advantage of Calrec’s broadcast-focused, in-house equipment to maximise their investment through local radio, podcasting, sports broadcasting and third-party hire.
And as we approach the 59th Super Bowl on February 9, we’re hoping that colleges are generating as big a feeder system to the companies covering the game as they are to the players on the pitch.
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