BRISTOL, Conn.—ESPN is ready to play ball with South Korea’s KBO baseball league, announcing a deal that will give the network exclusive English-language rights to air live games starting on the league’s opening day, May 5, and will include the regular season, postseason and Korean best-of-seven championship.

ESPN’s play-by-play voices, analysts and reporters will cover the game in English remotely from their home studios, including Karl Ravech, Jon Sciambi, Eduardo Perez, Jessica Mendoza and Kyle Peterson.

There will be six games aired live each week, Tuesday-Sunday, airing on ESPN 2 and the ESPN app. Tuesday-Fridays the games will air at 5:30 a.m. ET; Saturdays at 4 a.m. ET; and Sundays at 1 a.m. ET.

Highlights from league games will also be shown on ESPN information programming, including “SportsCenter.”

The telecast schedule and ESPN platform for league games is subject to change pending future live event considerations, said ESPN.

This will be among the first live sporting events ESPN will have aired since U.S. professional leagues were suspended following the outbreak of the coronavirus. South Korea experienced an outbreak of COVID-19 earlier in the year, but has reached a point where it is comfortable with playing professional sports.

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“During this unprecedented and difficult time, I hope the KBO League can bring consolation to the communities and provide guidelines to the world of sports,” said Un-Chan Chung, commissioner of the Korean Baseball Organization, on the ESPN deal.

MONTREAL—In an effort to improve its video replay process across its league, the Korean Baseball Organization has called on Grass Valley’s K2 Dyno Universe Replay Systems from the bullpen. The league has acquired nine K2 systems with K2 Summit 3G media servers and has installed in all nine of its stadiums across Korea.

KBO is able to manage all video feeds from the stadiums from a single remote control center in Seoul. Each K2 Summit media server has the capability to ingest 12 video feeds, including a multiviewer feed and multiple channels of video, which is patched to the central control center via an IP encoder/decoder.

The K2 Dyno Universe comes in a 4 RU system with 24 channels or a 6 RU system with 36 channels. Both systems are optimized for 6X or 4K operation and are 6X and 4K switchable. It also features a touchscreen interface, shuttle know and Grass Valley T-bar, AnySpeed technology for playback, and the ability to share content with the K2 media server infrastructure.