Turner Studios’ Sports Central System Snags BE Engineering Excellence Award for New Studio Technology, HD

Turner Studios’ Sports Central system has won the Broadcast Engineering Excellence Award for ‘New Studio Technology – HD’. EVS, the leading provider of live video production systems, provided a centralized ingest and playout workflow for the system, which was developed in-house to record, log, edit and broadcast 27,000 live recording hours of content from more than 6,000 live sports events each year.

“We’re delighted that the work of our Turner Studios technology team has been recognized with this award,” says Craig Heyl, senior vice president of Turner Studios. “This was a very complex project and thanks to the efforts of EVS and the other technology providers, it has been a big success.”

Turner Studios, the full service production division of the Turner Broadcasting System Inc. is responsible for providing the production systems and personnel that support Turner Sports coverage for many of the top US national sporting leagues. The group seamlessly broadcasts live sports for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), and the Professional Golfers Association of America (PGA), providing content that is used to feed live broadcasts, websites, mobile, multimedia platforms, and on-demand services in support of these partner Leagues.

Turner Studios designed a centralized production system for live feeds and highlights to supply quick turnaround media to Turner Sports’ partners and provide a historical record for search and retrieval of all archived content. They selected EVS XT3 and XS video production servers and IPDirector suites as the ingest and playout backbone of the new system. They also integrated solutions from several other manufacturers, including Dalet, Stainless Code, Quantum, NetApp, and Apple, to create a customized workflow solution.

Turner Studios Sports Central provides a growth ready platform that can expand in any needed area of feeds, playout, storage, or distribution. It allows Turner Sports to send content to partners quickly and efficiently, within seconds of air, and meet the demands of today’s fast-paced content anywhere, anytime, any-screen world.

“We congratulate Turner Studios on winning this prestigious award which sets the bar for innovation, design and construction of new facilities,” says Greg Macchia, VP of Operations, EVS Americas. “We’re extremely grateful and proud to have played such an integral role in their award-winning system. This award is a testament to our relationship with Turner Studios and the unmatched speed, reliability and performance of our servers.”

The Broadcast Engineering Excellence Awards are voted for by Broadcast Engineering readers.

The award will be presented to Turner Studios at the 2013 NAB Show taking place in Las Vegas on April 6-11.