WATERLOO, Ontario—With pandemic restrictions in Los Angeles, sports network Fox Deportes was forced to move from its headquarters to a temporary production control room from the garage of its director of operations. To support this new work-from-home setup, Fox Deportes relied on its Dejero-based mobile broadcasting flypacks at its new control room and at the homes of reporters.
Fox Deportes uses a combination of Dejero’s EnGo mobile transmitters, FlexPoint transceivers and PathWay encoders in remote production flypacks to support on-site reporting at major sporting events.
With their experience using the products, Fox Deportes was able to quickly adapt to COVID-19 restrictions. The temporary production control room was able to access public internet for the main connectivity with back-up coming from Dejero’s EnGo and its Smart Blending technology to combine multiple network connections in real time for enhanced reliability, expanded coverage and greater bandwidth capacity.
The remote production flypacks the network had were distributed to the homes of presenters, including one in Spain. These home studio setups utilized the Dejero PathWay encoder to deliver IFB into the home and aggregate all feeds coming from the home studio to send back to the temporary control room. Four CuePoint return video servers also were used to offer eight channels of video and audio return with low latency. The talent used the Dejero LivePlus app on a smartphone or tablet to create and deliver broadcast-quality video.
At the control room, three PathWays with four ports could receive, manage and switch 12 live streams simultaneously.
“We were actually ready for the pandemic before we ever knew it would hit!” said Ruben Rocha, director of operations at FOX Deportes. “We didn’t panic—we just applied the same workflows that Dejero already offered us for remote broadcasting to this new ‘reporting-from-home’ scenario. We were fully equipped and way ahead of the game.”
