CHARLOTTE & DALLAS—The Big 12 Conference and Gray Media’s Raycom Sports have launched Big 12 Studios, a new programming and content venture designed to expand and enhance the league’s storytelling efforts. The service is the league’s first FAST channel. 

“We’re grateful for the opportunity to build new platforms with the Big 12 Conference” said Hunter Nickell, CEO of Raycom Sports. “It’s an exciting new chapter for Raycom Sports to bring Big 12 schools, athletes, and stories to their fans wherever they want it.”

Big 12 Studios will create and deliver original programming and content to fans as a FAST (Free Ad-Supported Television) channel across multiple major platforms, including planned launches on leading platforms early this fall and on major VOD platforms such as YouTube. 

Select programming from Big 12 Studios will also air across local TV stations throughout multiple Big 12 Conference markets, which include Gray Media’s Arizona’s Family Sports Network in Phoenix and Tucson, KSMO in Kansas City, and KMYL in Lubbock, Texas.

Big 12 Studios will feature a variety of programming, such as in-game footage, highlights from recent contests, replays of historic Big 12 Conference showdowns, and in-depth expert analysis. Original content will include profiles of current and former Big 12 Conference student-athletes, highlighting their stories on and off the field.

Big 12 Studios will also feature a weekly show, Inside the 12, which will be distributed on air in addition to the FAST channel and VOD platforms such as YouTube. Hosted by Pete Sousa and Madison Hock, this weekly preview show kicks off this fall, focusing on showcasing the upcoming weekend’s full slate of Big 12 football games. Following football season, Inside the 12 will evolve to spotlight and preview additional Big 12 sports.

“We are thrilled to partner with Raycom Sports to launch the league’s first-ever 24/7 channel,” said Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark. “Storytelling is at the forefront of everything we do and is a key part of our narrative and brand building efforts. Through Big 12 Studios, we have the capability to showcase our brand and deliver original programming to fans across the country.”

The partnership brings Raycom Sports’ 45+ year history in producing and syndicating college sports programming for television, digital and social media platforms together with the Big 12’s powerful brands and championship history. Raycom Sports’ and the Big 12 Conference’s relationship spans back to the 1980s, when Raycom produced games for the Conference during its days as the Big Eight. 

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Gray Television has announced that the Origin Sports Network has expanded its lineup of distribution partners to include The Roku Channel and Samsung TV Plus, a move that more than quadrupled its addressable audience size. 

A 24/7 linear streaming network, Origin Sports brings viewers unique content featuring Hall of Famers, All-Americans, All-Stars, No. 1 picks and National Champions before they became household names. It operates under Gray’s Raycom Sports division.

Origin Sports launched in July with distribution on The Roku Channel in Canada and on XUMO in the United States, along with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

“We are thrilled with the early growth of Origin Sports,” said Chad Swofford, vice president of digital content at Raycom Sports. “In addition to our two compelling original content series, our responsive approach to programming has been well-received. Origin Sports’ agility has allowed us to give our audience historical perspective directly connected to what is happening in the sports world today.”

CHARLOTTE, N.C.— Gray Television’s Raycom Sports unit has launched the Origin Sports Network, a new 24 hour linear streaming OTT service that is live on The Roku Channel in Canada and XUMO in the U.S. 

Drawing on Raycom’s four plus decades of award-winning production expertise, Origin Sports is a 24 hour linear streaming network with programming featuring Hall of Famers, All-Americans, All-Stars and National Champions before they became household names.

The network’s first original production is called "The Rise," a series of 30-minute conversations starting with such stars such All-Pro Luke Kuechly (NFL) and Hall of Famers like James Lofton (NFL) and Dominique Wilkins (NBA). 

The company said Origin Sports will announce additional distribution partners and original programming in the coming months.

“Raycom Sports has a rich tradition of delivering the biggest moments, rivalries, stories and stars in sports directly to fans with no pay walls,” said Chad Swofford, VP of digital content at Raycom Sports. “We’re excited to continue that tradition with the introduction of Origin Sports. Building on our vast archives and leveraging our Emmy award-winning production team, Origin Sports will offer fans round-the-clock access to the biggest names in sports. From our flagship linear streaming network to social media destinations, we believe Origin Sports brings fans a unique perspective in the sports space, sitting at the intersection of the star-driven landscape of today and nostalgia of the past.”

“Raycom’s Origin Sports channel on XUMO brings unique focus and access to the most iconic games, sports moments and the all-star athletes who made them happen,” added Stefan Van Engen, senior vice president of programming and partnerships at XUMO. “XUMO’s enormous audience of sports lovers will gravitate to the variety and caliber of ‘best of’ action that Raycom is delivering.”

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—For the past four decades, Raycom Sports has produced collegiate sports content for syndicated and cable packages. In addition to our current partnership with the Atlantic Coast Conference (handling production for the conference’s Regional Sports Network and providing production services for ESPN’s upcoming ACC Network) we have also produced live mobile and documentary content for the Carolina Panthers, Blizzard Entertainment, The Basketball Tournament and Hot Wheels Monster Trucks Live. As Coordinating Producer, I have worked with our great staff and freelancers to produce Emmy-winning content for Raycom Sports since 2004.

We were recently presented with an exciting but daunting challenge to digitize our entire video library. While our current video workflow has been fully digital for multiple years, 40 years of content creation left a massive amount of invaluable historical assets on videotape. Our overall collection of nearly 40,000 tapes ranged from high definition formats like HDCAM and DVCPro to Betacam and 3/4 inch.

THE GOLF CHANNEL EXPERIENCE

We had to consider many factors when developing our solution. Off-site housing of a video library can be very effective with the appropriate budget, but it’s tougher for mid-sized production operations like ours. Since storage is a monthly cost in any remote library arrangement, all conversations about storing our video library elsewhere to lower expenses resulted in contingencies of lowering the quality of video archived or increasing the turnaround time for assets retrieved, and these concessions were unacceptable or too cumbersome.

So how best to store these new digital assets locally? Having utilized XDCAM cartridges since our jump to high definition, we had witnessed first-hand the durability and read/write speed benefits of Sony’s disc-based solutions. That experience, combined with the massive Optical Disc Archive (ODA) workflow implemented by the Golf Channel, among others, demonstrated that massive asset libraries could be stored locally without using data tape. Having also seen the Carolina Panthers implement the ODA solution, we were convinced ODA was the best fit for all of our production needs.

Thanks primarily to the tireless efforts of our Production/Archive Manager, Rob Chorney, Raycom Sports has digitized over 20,000 videotapes as of Dec. 1, 2018. The material digitized, which is comprised of ACC football and basketball games since 1983, represents about 85 percent of our Atlantic Coast Conference content and about 60 percent of our overall library. Our Sony Optical Disc Archive PetaSite implementation consists of three chassis housing 190 slots of ODA storage and four Gen2 drives. This footprint gives us over 600 TBs of storage in our active repository. Masstech’s Flashnet middleware allows editors working within our Avid Media Central environment to archive and retrieve assets from within the Avid GUI, providing editing efficiency. Additionally, having assets more readily available for distribution has increased our video licensing revenue.

We are extremely pleased with the PetaSite system and its potential for scalability. With the coming release of Gen3 technology, I am confident our video library will be securely housed by Sony for years to come.

Alex Farmartino is coordinating producer at Raycom Sports. A 14-time MidSouth Emmy winner, he has worked since 2004 in live mobile broadcast and documentary production. He can be reached atafarmartino@raycomsports.com.

Find out more athttps://pro.sony/ue_US/.

CHARLOTTE, N.C.--Raycom Sports has chosen Avid’s Media Central platform to streamline the production and management of digital assets associated with its NCAA Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) sports footage archive. Raycom Sports is a sports marketing, event management, and production firm owned by Montgomery, Ala.-based station group Raycom Media. 

Raycom Sports is making the move to Media Central from Avid to accelerate and simplify the provision of digital assets from its vast ACC media library to ESPN’s new ACC Network, starting in 2019.

While Raycom Sports has been producing and distributing NCAA ACC sports, primarily football and basketball events since the early 1980’s, and managing a library of digital ACC assets, this media library also includes 60-70 years of historical ACC footage that needs to be digitized, as quickly and efficiently as possible, to make it easier to search, access, archive and monetize.

[Read: Gray, Raycom To Combine, Creating Third Biggest Station Group]

Raycom Sports also indicated that its existing, aging media infrastructure made it challenging to support integrated workflows and remote teams, thereby slowing production and increasing costs. To overcome these challenges, Raycom Sports has opted to standardize on a fully integrated sports production workflow enabled by Avid MediaCentral that will support the ingest and archive of historical assets, making content accessible across departments and geographies, and handling their future UHD/4K needs.

“Avid’s reliable technology allows us to focus on telling compelling stories,” said Alex Farmartino, Coordinating Producer at Raycom Sports. “Whether it's the story of a game or a feature about a player off the field, the main reason we’ve stuck with Avid is it works…and allows you to do your job better.”

Avid channel partner Marshall Graphics Systems will help Raycom Sports implement the MediaCentral collaborative workflow, including Avid NEXIS software-defined storage, MediaCentral | Asset Management and Avid FastServe media servers.

“In the competitive world of sports broadcasting, media companies can offset increasing operation costs and create new revenue streams by being able to quickly search for and repurpose existing content,” said Ray Thompson, Director, Broadcast and Media Solutions Marketing at Avid.

Thompson added, “Raycom Sports can [now] facilitate remote production and collaboration by enabling staff across departments and locations to search for and access the same media, while streamlining media lifecycle management and ensuring historical content is preserved for future generations to enjoy.”