NASCAR Media Group Awards Integration Contract for HOF and New Home to CEI

By Ken Kerschbaumer

NASCAR Media Group has selected Communications Engineering Inc. (CEI) as the integrator for the NASCAR Hall of Fame, to open in Charlotte, NC, in December 2009. The new facility will also be the home of NASCAR Media Group’s technical operations as well as a multimedia museum experience that will give visitors a sense of NASCAR’s rich and vibrant past.

“We chose CEI on the basis of a strong bid and their experience building the Newseum in Washington, DC,” says Jeff Lowe, NASCAR Media Group, managing Director, media and broadcast technologies.

Technical details are still being completed, but NASCAR Media Group’s entire asset- management system, up to 40 online edit suites, and 50 TB of local storage plus a couple of hundred TBs of nearline storage are in the plans. A 3G infrastructure for 1080p production and distribution is also part of the current plan, and cable in the new facility will be pulled beginning in March.

Raef Alkhayat, CEI director of engineering, says the integration work CEI did on the Newseum, whether the interactive displays in the public areas or the production control room, monitor walls and video-processing technologies, gives he and CEI staffers a head start on understanding the task at hand.

“This is a tremendous opportunity for us,” says Alkhayat. “We’ve been doing integration work for more than 20 years, but we havn’t been too involved with the sports industry. So this is very exciting.”