PSSI Global Services Engineers Multipath, Low-Latency Transmissions for CFP National Championship

PSSI Global Services encoded and decoded a total of 74 paths at unmatched data rates as the exclusive transmission services provider for ESPN’s College Football Playoff National Championship coverage on all seven of its networks plus the SEC Network. With 30 of the 74 paths routed out of a single mobile teleport at faster-than-ever speeds, this transmission represents an unprecedented accomplishment.

PSSI Global Services is the first company to manage all inbound and outbound paths — via both satellite and fiber — for the College Football Playoff series and National Championship. For the championship game at Raymond James stadium, the company leveraged the C27, its cutting-edge, dual-antenna mobile teleport, to engineer 24 outbound paths and six inbound paths via satellite. In addition to managing these satellite feeds, PSSI Global Services provided encoding and multiplexing over fiber for an additional 44 paths at the stadium — 24 outbound paths over three multiplexed circuits at a total of 600 Mbps and 20 inbound paths over two multiplexed circuits at a total of 400 Mbps.

“Until now, one or two companies handled the encoding while another company uplinked to the satellite and yet another company managed the fiber transmissions,” says Rick Ball, director of broadcast sports at PSSI Global Services. “With this project, PSSI Global Services proved itself to be a total solutions provider with cutting-edge technology and unmatched engineering services. But our work doesn’t stop here — our engineering team is always striving to push boundaries further, set new records and help our broadcast clients accomplish even more.”
Beyond Raymond James Stadium, the company also provided uplink and encoding services at other locations throughout Tampa for related ESPN programming, including SportsCenter and Mike & Mike. For SportsCenter, PSSI Global Services successfully executed the lowest-latency two-way transmission in live-to-air broadcast history. With a compression processing time of less than 100 milliseconds, resulting in a stunning round-trip transmission time of 1.1 seconds, this ultralow-latency two-way transmission is a groundbreaking achievement in the satellite broadcast industry.