Litepanels Delivers Energy-Efficient Lighting for Time Warner Cable SportsNet, Time Warner Cable Deportes

Time Warner Cable SportsNet and Time Warner Cable Deportes in El Segundo, California, are housed in one of the most energy-efficient buildings in America.  The use of LED lighting in the studios not only contributed to the facility’s LEED-certification, but also played a big part in Redwood Media Group receiving the 2012-2013 Los Angeles Area Emmy for Creative Technical Crafts for lighting the networks’ studios. A major factor in the reduction of energy used by the studios was the installation of Litepanels daylight LED lighting fixtures.

Time Warner Cable SportsNet and Time Warner Cable Deportes operates two production studios and two insert studios that enable them to provide simultaneous programming in both English and Spanish. The amount of power necessary for LED fixtures is much less than what traditional lighting fixtures require. Redwood Media Group Lighting Designer, Steve Mulkey, calculated that the 15,000 Watts drawn by Litepanels LED fixtures in all four studios was just one tenth of what would have been required to provide comparable illumination using incandescent fixtures.

“It’s huge!” said Time Warner Cable Sports VP of Operations Mark Coleman as he described the energy savings afforded by going with LED studio lighting fixtures. “The building was able to downsize the amount of air conditioning that was required, which then obviously required us to not only buy less air conditioning but to use less energy to create that much air cooling.”

To keep Time Warner Cable SportsNet and Time Warner Cable Deportes up and running even during a power outage, the facility has on-site emergency power generation. But because of the reduced amount of energy required for lighting and cooling the studios, Time Warner Cable Sports was able to buy a much smaller generator.

Coleman recalled the headaches he and his Senior Director of Engineering and Operations Andy Murphy experienced trying to match on-set monitors to tungsten lighting at facilities where they had previously worked. He compared that to the ease of matching monitors with the daylight Litepanels fixtures at Time Warner Cable SportsNet and Time Warner Cable Deportes, which was critical due to the tight time window between set construction and lighting, and when the networks went live on October 1, 2012.

“Daylight balance lighting takes all the drama out of selecting displays, because you don’t have to worry about finding the ones that will actually have the ability to handle the color correction of the display to match tungsten color balance lighting.” Instead of buying expensive monitors with wide color correction capability, they were able to purchase consumer flat screens.

Another feature of Litepanels LED fixtures that helps the bottom line is that the expected life of an LED is ten years or more. “Being able to rely on all the lights coming on and staying on, hour after hour, day after day, is one less thing to worry about,” said Coleman.

The crew from Redwood Media Group used a variety of Litepanels LED fixtures, including Sola 6 Fresnels, Sola 4 Fresnels, 1×1 Floods, and the high output Hilio. The Hilios came into play on the demonstration areas in each of the production studios, where Mulkey said they provide “stadium-like” lighting.