By Michael Burns
Friday, January 3, 2025 – 09:28
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The PGA TOUR Studios building at the PGA TOUR Global Home campus houses 17 HawkReplay servers and four HawkNest servers (Photo: Chris Condon/PGA TOUR)
2024 was a landmark year for Hawk-Eye Innovation’s Broadcast Solutions Division, which focuses on live production, offering a full broadcasting ecosystem for venues, facilities and trucks.
“When people hear about Hawkeye, they think officiating, data-driven stats, or VAR; we’re not any of those things. It’s separate from the core,” says K. Douglas Price, head of commercial & operations broadcast solutions at Hawk-Eye. “But we’re always sharing ideas about improved production capabilities. We’re able to take that technology and improve [capabilities] for the broadcast side, and for the broadcasters.”
Slow-mo-in-one
Sitting down to chat with SVG Europe before Christmas, Price cited The Masters, The Open (US and British), The Players Championship with CBS, and the Super Bowl LVIII as standout achievements. Considering the latter project, he says: “We streamlined a complex solution for the most-watched TV programme in US history. Six of the nine operators worked remotely, including 4K zoom operators, showcasing the power of remote production.”
The company has also enjoyed success with the HawkReplay remote production and instant replay broadcast solution, “bringing 4x UHD slow-mo to the industry, primarily working in conjunction with the Sony HDC 5500 UHD”, says Price. “We’re continuing that work with the HDC-P50.”
The Sony-owned business launched its HawkNest asset management server at IBC2024, built in just 10 months. “That was a monumental release, a massive effort on the part of our team for something that probably should have taken three to four years,” he adds. “It allows us to have an end-to-end broadcast solution: we have the cameras from the Sony side. We have replay capabilities from HD up to UHD, with all the slow-mo in between. And now we have an asset management, load balancing solution that complements our replay system. We continue to keep moving forward, and the feedback that we’re getting from customers is astronomically positive.”
However, collaborating with The Professional Golfers’ Association on the new PGA Studios project at Ponte Vedra, Florida, has been a major highlight for the broadcast division. The facility will house the bulk of PGA productions with centralised operators.
“HawkNest is pivotal for PGA Studios to help them with their media management for thousands of clips a day,” says Price. “The cost efficiencies of running productions in this way, the time saved and reimagined workflows are opening a host of new possibilities for broadcasters. Our focus has been on that project, but out of that has also spun many, many other projects and some features.”
Officially launched on 2 January, the state-of-the-art facility houses 17 HawkReplay servers and four HawkNest servers on the studio side, enabling 16 remote operators to access all 144 inputs across the network.
“Every shot on the live side has two ingest systems and three HawkNest systems,” says Price. “Also CBS Sports has been testing HawkNest during the NFL season; they’re working with 17 to 20 HawkReplay systems. They’ve been strong advocates for our technology.”
“In the US, most broadcasters use some version of the HawkReplay system. ESPN employs it for Monday Night Football, Amazon uses it for Thursday Night Football, and Netflix will feature it in their two Christmas shows,” he continues. “Broadcasters and truck companies are increasingly recognising the value of our solutions. For example, Netflix’s Full Swing uses our replay systems to ingest 140 feeds from major PGA tournaments, excluding handheld roaming shots, to build out the show’s content. Our technology supports workflows from live production through to post-production.”
European growth
Price says the company is also seeing exciting growth in Europe. “Many broadcasters, including The Open Championship and the Scottish Open, have used our systems over the past two years. The Ryder Cup also utilised our technology, and we’re in discussions to expand further in 2025.”
“While we don’t yet have many systems deployed in Europe, grassroots interest is growing, especially among freelancers who see the potential,” he continues. “For example, ten users work with our systems annually at The Open, and feedback from these professionals is helping us build a strong foundation. Just last week, after presentations in Denmark, we were invited back ahead of NAB. The momentum in Europe is building, and we’re optimistic about what’s ahead.”
Price says one key differentiator for HawkReplay is the ability to capture all feeds. “They’re 16-channel boxes, and maybe you’re only following 12 feeds, but on cameras 15 and 16, something happens. It’s just a matter of rerouting 15 and 16, just rewinding, and we go back and catch that hole-in-one, or that goal. That’s unlike traditional replay systems limited to specific routed feeds; once a moment is missed, it’s gone. That has started to ring dynamically not only with the broadcasters but also with the production teams who don’t want to miss key moments.
“For example, a typical PGA event may have around 100 feeds, while major tournaments push up to 140. We capture all these feeds.”
“The momentum in Europe is building, and we’re optimistic about what’s ahead”
He offers an example of capturing a 196th-ranked golfer getting a hole-in-one. “Nobody else would have caught it, but then we’re able to tell his story,” he says. “One of the things that separates us is that [whereas others] make a clip, we’re making markers. We’re recording everything. The only time we make a clip is when we need to export it, and that gives us greater flexibility to move files around.”
“That’s where HawkNEST comes in,” he adds. “It allows the media manager to be able to manipulate media that has been created on eight different replay systems but not affect the replay operators. The operators can focus on what they need to focus on, it gives them more time to tell the story, not just react. That’s where storytelling falls apart, in my opinion; people reacting to what just happened, but then looking forward and not really paying attention to the present, whereas with Hawkeye, we have that flexibility.”
Sound storytelling
“Broadcasters love what we’re doing; we allow them to capture more. We give them more of an opportunity to tell the story,” he says.
“Something that everybody always seems to get concerned about is the audio. Audio brings so much more to the environment, and we allow the user to be a little bit more creative.
“We have the ability to align our audio so that as it changes, as camera one goes from hole one to hole two to hole three, we track that as it changes all the way through. There’s some setup work you need to do on the front end, but it allows you to have a much smoother production, which is not something that you typically hear about covering golf events. We keep hearing from the operators that we’ve trained, who have bought into the Hawk-Eye way of doing things, that they are more efficient, and they have way more time on their hands to be creative.”
Eye on the ball
Currently, the replay system is on-prem, but Hawk-Eye is researching a cloud strategy for 2025. Instead of rushing into cloud adoption, Price says the company is working closely with customers to ensure it delivers real value.
“There’s nothing worse than seeing competitors chase each other, but offer no real value to the end user,” he says. “We’re asking ‘How do you want it to differ from what you have on-prem?’ ‘What can we do to make that more efficient and effective for you?’ Some of our focus in 2025 is on R&D and to do that leg work. I don’t necessarily think that others in the industry have done that. They simply reacted.”
“[We create] things that came out of conversations with broadcasters,” he continues. “They wanted flexibility. They wanted non-interruptible workflows so that they could get more done. We have conversations like this regularly, constantly leading to change; we’ll probably be announcing additional changes at NAB based on our development work with one of our customers.”
“I know what our roadmap looks like from a feature standpoint,” he adds. “We want to make sure that we’re listening to the customers on cloud, so between now and IBC, I think you’re going to see and hear a lot about Hawk-Eye. We have big ambitions and big goals, and we aim to meet and exceed those along the way.”
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