SVG Summit: College Networks Battle Scale With Innovative Workflows

In case you missed this year’s SVG Summit, Dec. 15-16 at the New York Hilton Hotel, SVG has assembled video highlights of every single Day Two session, allowing you to see what you may have missed during the day’s keynote conversations and panels. Full videos of every session will be available on the SVG Members page in the coming days, but SVG will showcase the best moments in a series of stories this week.

College sports networks took the main stage for the first time at the SVG Summit last week and the conversation centered around how those content creators go about meeting the year-round demands of their viewers and the schools they program for.

The panel delved into how these college sports content producers meet tremendously large content demands and what innovative and cost-saving workflows they use to produce everything from a big-time Saturday football game to a midweek Olympic sporting event. Perspectives were offered from those on the production and technological sides of the house, including ESPN & SEC Network Coordinating Producer Meg Aronowitz; Pac-12 Networks VP, Technology and Engineering Michael Harabin; Big Ten Network SVP, Production and Executive Producer Mark Hulsey; and Sinclair Television Group SVP/CTO Del Parks.

On top of logistics, the conversation discussed how student-assisted productions are becoming bigger parts of their efforts, how fiber infrastructures are driving conference-wide cohesion, and how exclusive insider access is driving new programming trends.

Aronowitz describes the laborious process that went into establishing the SEC Network:

Hulsey outlines how the Big Ten Network manages to pull off over a thousand live events per year:

Harabin and Hulsey dive into how at-home workflows make a lot of their live event programming possible:

Parks gives the crowd a peek into the new American Sports Network:

Aronowitz says a lot of work went into getting the schools of the SEC Network up to producing many of their own live events:

Hulsey’s confidence in student-produced events has grown tremendously:

Hulsey, Aronowitz, and Harabin agree that the future of college sports programming lies in inside-access content:

Parks forecasts the immediate future prospects of the American Sports Network: