MEMBER PROFILE
MLB broadcasters warm up in SD
By
Mar 8, 2007 - 10:21:10 AM

By Andrew Lippe
SVG Assistant Editor

Baseball broadcasters are warming up with the players in Florida and Arizona for the upcoming MLB season. SportsTime Ohio (STO) will broadcast eight preseason Cleveland Indian games on WKYC-TV, the NBC affiliate in Cleveland while the YES Network, home of the New York Yankees will blast out 16 games. But neither will do HD despite strong HD plans for the upcoming regular season.

SportsTime Ohio (STO) will broadcast eight preseason Cleveland Indian games on WKYC-TV, the NBC affiliate in Cleveland. WKYC provides STO with TV production services for both broadcast and cable games and STO can also be seen on Time Warner Cable, the Dish Network, and DirecTV.

Pat Murray, the director of baseball operations at WKYC-TV about the upcoming Indians season, says a production truck from Lyon Video out of Columbus, OH will handle the productions.

“During the regular season we’re situated in a control room at WKYC-TV and for home games we produce game telecasts out of the control room and not out of a production truck,” he says. “For away games we use the Lyon truck.” The network will use a production crew of seven people.

Meanwhile the YES Network is in the midst of offering up 16 spring training games, nearly double the games broadcast last year. Mike Webb, YES Network’s director of Broadcast Operations, says, “The simple reason we increased the number of games is that People want to watch them. People are extremely excited for baseball.”

Like in the regular YES will use a truck from Game Creek Video however it won’t be the Yankee Clipper. Instead it’s Game Creek Olympic, which will allow for simpler five-camera shoots with Sony BVP-900 and 500 cameras.

“We also have fewer operators and only two EVS systems on hand,” during the regular season the crew, including production, is almost 30 people.”

Neither Yankee nor Indians fans will be able to see their teams spring games in HD.

“During the regular season our home games are in HD where our road games are not,” says Murray. “Due to increasing costs spring training is not in HD. We almost pulled the trigger for the entire regular season to be in HD. That transition could happen very soon.”



© Copyright 2006-2008 sportsvideogroup