With the college football season well underway, the constant need to improve the fan experience has never been greater.
That’s easy to understand when considering the fan’s perspective. The ease of lounging in front of a 4K screen in an easy chair while enjoying some inexpensive eats—and the overall time and money saved—has created stiff competition for athletic programs that need to fill expensive seats in massive stadiums.
So what’s one way for the athletic programs to battle back? By providing multifaceted—and sometimes mind-blowing—film and video upgrades.
Brandon Meier has had a front-row seat for this progression. He started his career at the University of Nebraska as many dream of doing—as a student production assistant from 1996 to 2002. Over that span, he worked in the university athletic department’s HuskerVision unit.
Back In the Day
HuskerVision was created in 1994 to operate two large Mitsubishi CRT screens and produce video content for the Cornhuskers back when Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium had 3,000 square feet of broadcast facilities.
Today, Meier is the deputy athletic director of external affairs and oversees all creative and content for Nebraska athletics. This included the recent installation of a new Daktronics 117-foot-by-33-foot screen, and 25,000 square feet of production facilities following a move into the football team’s former offices. That shift involved a $13 million upgrade in broadcast facilities, including a $6.5 million investment in equipment and infrastructure.
The facility now houses the eight full-time HuskerVision staff who handle in-game video and other broadcast duties from three control rooms. They control the SMPTE 2110 broadcast deployment with an IP data center-level infrastructure, 12 4K Grass Valley Group HDR cameras and three EVS servers with 2 terabytes of IP switching capacity. Nebraska was the first university to install Lawo/VSM routing and IP management infrastructure, Meier said.
The new HuskerVision production facility (read more about it in SCN) also includes 34 operator stations, a new rack room with 40 racks and a centralized UPS backup with Liebert air conditioning units to keep the operation cool.
Much of its non-event content is shot in a 2,600-square-foot studio with a 24-foot green-screen cyclorama, full AES 67 IP audio integration with Lawo I/O frames for trucks to grab video feeds and a Riedel intercom. Beck TV was the project integrator.
While the group uses all three control rooms at peak times, it’s the master control room that serves Nebraska’s eight other athletic venues around campus. Meier said Mark Jacobson from Chicago-based Stadia Video Group “did an amazing job as our consultant and provided great value for our overall investment. He also worked hand-in-hand with Brock Raum, a former HuskerVision production assistant, who was the senior engineer for Beck TV overseeing the equipment integration.”
The Kickoff
But since it’s football season, Meier has enjoyed the new production capabilities on game day. “Higher-quality replays, better clarity of camera images and larger lenses help engage the fans to interact with our show,” he said, although the main improvement is “better, more reliable workflow.”
“We can be ready to go in a moment from one venue to another,” he said. “We may have volleyball at 3 p.m., then football at 6 p.m. In the spring. It’s not uncommon for us to have three events at once.”
Meier said that while much of HuskerVision’s equipment “was end-of-life, so it was time” for the update, there’s an additional benefit. “This helps us prepare our students for top industry positions and it gives them experience with state-of-the-art broadcast gear,” he said.
For more information, check out “Cornhuskers Coverage Conversion” on TV Tech sister brand SCN.
How Vast Is It?
The big new attraction at the University of Illinois’ Gies Memorial Stadium is a $30 million Daktronics video board above the south end zone, measuring 17,300 square feet (250 feet by 69 feet, which would rank fifth in the NFL). It’s “the largest in all of college athletics,” said Derryl Myles, senior associate athletic director for Fighting Illini Production and Technology.
The board is so vast that it is about 6,700 square feet larger than the board at Auburn University’s Jordan-Hare Stadium, which ranks second in the Football Bowl Subdivision. On its back are two more video displays to greet the Fighting Illini faithful as they arrive for the game, with each measuring 29.5 feet by 52.5 feet.
But that’s just the first upgrade in the overhaul of the video and broadcast operation, which also includes a 12.5-foot-by-180-foot “super ribbon” under the north end zone, with east and west ribbons of 4 feet by 427 feet.
New broadcast infrastructure is used to create and distribute content for the screens and elsewhere within the U of I’s network. It starts with content capture via six in-stadium Grass Valley LDX 150s, plus two Bolin PTZ cams mounted on the goalposts.
Images are distributed from the new control room, which is located not in the stadium but in the nearby Bielfeldt Athletics Administration Building. It features an IP infrastructure, which works off of an Evertz Magnum router; NETGEAR and Cisco switchers, using SMPTE 2110 with SDI baseband support; one Ross Carbonite switcher, with two XPressions with four channels each; and two Evertz Dreamcatchers for replays.
Showing the Money
The university is making best use of the old equipment, as it now serves as a second control room for streaming service B1G+ (Big Ten+) for “overlapping smaller events” held in the basketball arena, State Farm Center, Myles said. It includes four Sony 300 Triax HD cameras, a Ross Carbonite switcher with one channel of Xpression and the Mira Abacus for replay.
To connect the new network, Illinois has 144 strands of fiber emanating from Bielfeldt, 72 of which are dedicated to Memorial Stadium and 72 to State Farm Arena. The old auxiliary fiber still connects Huff Hall, home to smaller sports such as gymnastics, wrestling and volleyball.
Myles said the update was made for this football season for simple reasons: It was time and the athletic department had the money.
“Our infrastructure was about 12 years old when longtime fan and university donor Larry Gies generously contributed $100 million to university athletics, [which is] the biggest of many of Gies’s gifts to the university that he loves,” he said. The updates also include Wi-Fi
upgrades at more than 100 access points throughout the stadium through a partnership with MSB Engineering.
“The cool thing about it is that we’re now more flexible in what we can do in and out of the stadium, with various user interfaces,” Myles said.
So while accessing a philanthropic contribution is a long process, “We’ve moved forward since it was approved in January,” said Myles, who now has a new task at hand. “We’re still in the trial and error stage with our new Daktronics boards, but we’re making progress every day.”
Coming Attractions
You could say the technical updates at The Ohio State University, another Big Ten stalwart, are two-fold. Some of the work is complete and more is underway, slated for completion before the 2027 football season.
The obvious upgrade is the new north videoboard, standing out in the closed end of Ohio Stadium. The 44-foot-by-17-foot board from Daktronics is complemented by new 4.5-by-450-foot LED ribbon boards mounted on the fascia of the upper deck, along the east and west sidelines.
The coming attraction is rising on the southern end of the property: A new $3.8 million, 21,500-square-foot (total area) TV compound benchmarked for the ever-varying number of large and small trucks on hand to cover a given day’s competition.
“We’re relocating the site from the general-use parking lot to one near the Huntington Club entrance, which is 450 feet south of the stadium,” Executive Associate Athletic Director Mike Penner said.
The new building will house an Evertz ENX Router, Evertz 5800MSC sync generator and Evertz 3406 SDI transport; Sencore AFN-1000 IP encoders and a Sencore MRD 80100 decoder; Dante audio ML-32D, ML-16D and MM-2D-X transports by Tascam; and a Phabrix QXL SDI analyzer.
Part of the impetus for the new compound is to accommodate more production vehicles. That’s been spurred by the growing number of marquee TV matchups held in Ohio Stadium, as the footprint for Big Ten and potential College Football Playoff games “can require that a given facility accommodate more trucks, generators, satellite uplinks and main connections,” Penner said.
“It’s a better space for the networks to set up,” he said. “It’s covered from the elements and will be unified with our broadcast in-house production for TV, cable, audio/visual transit and digital video signage.”
Wait ’Til Next Year
But that isn’t all that is on the horizon.
Back in the bowl, coming in 2027 is a new 157-foot-by-45-foot video board, as well as a 157-by-10-foot LED ribbon board that will be complemented by a new audio system with Fulcrum speakers and Powersoft amps installed by C.V. Lloyde Audiovisual. This time, the updates will all be in the south end zone.
There is also an LED control room in the press box. Game-day video content is captured via 12 Sony professional-grade PTZ, production and cine cameras, with Ross routing, graphics and switchers.
About 500 feet of fiber connects the TV compound to a hub inside the Ohio Stadium, with several hundred more connecting the main nerve center in the Schottenstein Center around a campus that supports more than three dozen teams.
The arena, which lies across the Olentangy River from Ohio Stadium (but still within the campus footprint), contains a Grass Valley main switcher and tech from Ross Video for routing and graphics, Dreamcatcher for Replay and Sony Cinecameras for PTZ and production.
Into A Higher Gear
When the University of Washington agreed to join the Big Ten two years ago, the move came with various mandates for upgrades in and around the campus, including a big change in avenues for the creation and distribution of sports content.
That led to an extra improvement that wasn’t expected, but more on that later. First, it called for the building of four new control rooms, not inside Husky Stadium but in Alaska Airlines Arena, which connects to several venues around the campus.
Just how these four SMPTE 2110-based control rooms inside the arena “are broken down and used varies greatly,” Deputy Athletic Director Kurt Svoboda said of an operation which incorporates more than 20 Grass Valley and Sony cameras.
In the case of Huskies football, games involve three scoreboards from Daktronics. This includes the east main video board, which is 31.2 feet by 108 feet, plus two wing boards that measure 18 feet by 31 feet each, alongside three rows of ribbon boards.
New gear in master control includes two GVG K-Frame SXP switchers, six Ross XPressions for graphics and six Evertz Dreamcatchers. Anthony James Partners was the system integrator, with major university partners GVG and CTI.
The university has also added a 1,000-square-foot video and photography studio with seven LED columns that can be configured into a single 10-foot-by-27-foot background, “which is big for a small room,” said Svoboda, also noting the separate Pro Cyc wall.
“That space is where we can host a sports talk show, students’ athletic promos, interstitial content,” Svoboda said, noting the versatility offered by the new setup. “We have a 2,300-square-foot event space with another LED wall that measures almost 7 feet by 12 feet, between the control rooms and photo/video room.
“So we can host a premium event for professional industry groups where guests can watch the games unfold in the arena before them,” he said.
Getting Schooled
The above illustrates what often happens when a university athletic department changes conferences. “When we were in the Pac-12 we didn’t need these spaces, since the conference handled all of the game broadcasts,” Svoboda said.
“However, when we joined the Big Ten, we had to upgrade our infrastructure so we could provide content to the Big Ten Network,” he said. “That was an extra challenge at the time, because we never had athletic employees in the content creation space, nor did the university have a major for it—nor do we to this day.”
That said, the university has “grown a
great deal” in just two years. “In 2024, we had no student workers and we needed hands,” Svoboda said. “Since then, we’ve gained 50 students who are working with us. Some got full-time jobs in the industry when they graduated with unrelated degrees, but still offered actual working experience.”
Today, the approach at UW is still evolving.
“We now have a four-credit class in sports video production because the university has recognized its importance to what we do to the point that our production personnel now serve the entire university for its video production needs,” he said. “So we’re very proud of that.” ●
