MLB Network Takes Home Four Sports Emmys with Help from Grass Valley

MLB Network, having completed its first full year in operation, has been honored with four Sports Emmy awards for its inaugural year, including its signature daily studio show MLB Tonight. Three of the awards presented by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) honor MLB Network’s technical acumen in building one of the largest and most complex file-based video production centers in the country.

MLB Tonight was honored in the following categories: Outstanding Technical Team Studio; Outstanding Graphic Design; and Outstanding Production Design and Art Direction. MLB Network’s Bob Costas won his 20th Emmy Award for Outstanding Sports Personality- Studio Host for his work with both MLB Network and NBC Sports.

MLB Network’s facility in Secaucus, NJ features a networked editing environment and a content management and repurposing architecture supported by Grass Valley technologies, including a fully networked Grass Valley Storage Area Network (SAN) with dozens of Grass Valley Aurora Edit HD editing and other Aurora products working alongside Final Cut Pro edit systems.

“We are grateful to Grass Valley for their assistance in establishing our file-based video production system that was honored by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences,” says Tab Butler, director of media management at MLB Network.

In the upcoming season, MLB Network editors will take advantage of the latest features of the Grass Valley Aurora 7.0 software suite, which allows the network to digitize media within the Aurora Ingest application, work on a project in Aurora Edit, and then output that finished news segment to Aurora Playout. As MLBN does all this, the associated metadata travels along with the media and can be accessed for a variety of tasks (e.g., clip management on a server) that streamline the production process.

“We sincerely compliment MLB Network and the people involved in designing and implementing a true state-of-the-art facility that the rest of the industry has looked at closely and learned from,” says Jeff Rosica, SVP of Grass Valley. “As a technology supplier, we are proud to be a part of this iconic facility and to have helped MLB Network archive its goals of sharing and creating content in a timely fashion that is completely seamless to the production staff. The Emmy Awards are well deserved.”

Grass Valley’s MediaFrame SDK enables tight integration with MLB Network’s proprietary asset management system, allowing journalists, producers, and editors to quickly and accurately locate, retrieve and view video clips from its vast archive on any desktop in the building.

MediaFrame features a multi-layered software architecture that leverages metadata in unique ways that quickly (in real time) and intuitively facilitate taking raw materials and turning them into finished segments for direct airing. It makes users more productive by benefiting all of the applications that comprise the Aurora platform—including Aurora Edit, Aurora Ingest, Aurora Playout, and Aurora Browse.