MINNEAPOLIS—Stadium Sports Network chose Telycam Explore XE cameras for its coverage of the U.S. Curling Trials for the Winter Olympics in Italy.
Stadium Sports Network has its roots in the specialized systems-integration firm Curling Stadium, which focused on deploying streaming solutions in curling arenas. The success of those deployments led to requests for it to provide full production services for organizations such as USA Curling and the international governing body World Curling. Founder and CTO John Benton expanded the company into the full-service Stadium Sports Network to meet this growing demand.
Now serving an increasingly high-end clientele, Stadium Sports knew it would need to upgrade from its previous PTZ cameras. “World Curling and USA Curling distribute our feeds to premium buyers, such as [Canadian sports network] TSN and other international television channels, who then air it on linear TV,” Benton said. “We knew we needed to provide better quality for linear television, and that our existing PTZ cameras weren’t going to cut it.”
Benton wanted cameras with 1-inch sensors and the ability to handle the unique demands of capturing curling. This objective became even more important when Stadium Sports was contracted to produce the U.S. Curling Trials in South Dakota for NBC Sports in November 2025. The even—which would determine which teams would represent the United States at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics—was to be broadcast on USA Network and NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service.
“When we were working on the Olympic curling trials, it was crucial that the cameras could handle the lighting, exposure and focusing challenges of shooting on a 200-foot sheet of ice,” said Benton, a former Olympian himself. “There were cameras from the big broadcast brand names that could do it, but their high cost meant that purchasing them rather than renting them would make it difficult for us to offer our production services cost-competitively.”
Stadium Sports’ partner in Scotland, David Owen of Curling Stadium Europe, recommended Benton look at Telycam’s Explore series. Benton evaluated the Telycam Explore XE broadcast-class PTZ cameras. The cameras impressed him, and he purchased three Explore XE units for the upcoming production.
For the USA Curling event, Stadium Sports used the three Telycam Explore XE cameras as primary cameras. Two were positioned as overhead cameras hung on a truss above the ice, over scoring areas at each end known as “the house.” The third camera, referred to as the “slide camera,” was deployed on the field of play. All three cameras panned, tilted and zoomed throughout the matches.
The Telycam PTZ cameras output NDI HX3 streams, which were transported to the production room over a Ubiquiti network with 10 Gbps fiber connectivity. The production center housed four space-efficient operator stations: the main switcher system, running vMix software; two camera operator positions; and a graphics and audio station, featuring Singular Live HTML5 graphics and a Behringer X32 mixing console.
The upgrade to the new PTZ cameras delivered the quality gains Benton sought. “We couldn’t be happier with the Telycam Explore XE cameras,” he praised. “And more importantly, NBC Sports and Peacock were also very happy with the quality we produced.”
More information is available on the Telycam website.
