Temple Athletics Enters New Era With In-House Control Room for Live Streaming

Built around Ross Video gear, the facility powers live production for ESPN+

For Kevin Hession, director, video production/broadcast engineer, Athletics Department, Temple University, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse.

In fall 2019, he was happily producing live events in the ultra-busy (at the time) Ivy League for Brown University. But, when Kevin Copp, associate athletic director, video production, Temple  – a former Ivy League colleague — came calling with an opportunity to oversee construction of a brand-new control room, how could he possibly say no?

Temple University’s brand-new centralized control room in Liacouras Center supports live-streaming production to the AAC’s media-rights partner, ESPN.

A move down I-95, a global pandemic, and a speedy integration later, Hession and his team of three full-time video-production professionals are ensconced in their new control room, delivering a wealth of live coverage of Owl sports to ESPN

“This is an opportunity to bring more in-depth coverage of Temple’s athletics programs than our alumni and fanbase may traditionally be used to,” says Hession. “We have a solid team here now, and we’re starting to put some miles on this thing. We needed to do this, and this was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.”

The control room, which takes up space previously occupied by a storage room in Temple’s primary basketball venue, Liacouras Center, and can produce live broadcasts of multiple sports from three athletics facilities on campus. In addition to Liacouras Center, the control room is connected via 24 strands of fiber to McGonigle Hall across the street (courtesy of the Temple University IT Department) and by NDI cloud through internet connection provided by Comcast to the Temple Sports Complex, which is about a half mile down the road.

Construction began in earnest in fall 2019 when Hession came on board, but it hit a significant roadblock when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down collegiate athletics in March 2020. The goal had been to have a control room operational for the start of the 2020-21 academic year, which is when the American Athletic Conference’s media-rights agreement with ESPN would deliver live sports coverage to the rapidly growing ESPN+ streaming platform.

Integrated by Alpha Video, Temple’s new control room is built around a core of gear from Ross Video.

Instead, Liacouras Center became a FEMA overflow center in Philadelphia’s fight against the coronavirus, and full integration on the room didn’t begin until September.

Working with integration partner Alpha Video, the Temple team built the space in just three months, finishing it five days before its first event: a men’s basketball game vs. New Jersey Institute of Technology on Dec. 19.

“To go from a storage space to a fully produced in-house men’s basketball game in about a year,” says Hession. “I’m still shocked at how quickly that went.

The control room is built around Ross gear: Ultrix 5RU routing core, Carbonite Ultra production switcher, Carbonite Black 2S 2M/E control panel, a pair of Xpressions (provided by the AAC office to facilitate graphics integration with league media partner ESPN), Abekas Mira+ eight-channel replay system, Yamaha CL3 digital audio-mixing console, and Telex RTS ODIN 64-port intercom matrix.

The gear supports a full-fledged, two-bench primary control room. An additional B-level control room, Hession says, is being constructed in the back. The hope is, having the secondary space will enable simultaneous production of multiple events for live streaming. The need for such ability was emphasized during an extremely busy crossover season this spring, when numerous winter, spring, and rescheduled fall sports overlapped.

After construction and integration that took less than three months, a home men’s basketball game on Dec. 19 was the first event produced from the new control room.

In addition to Copp and Hession, Live Production Coordinators Cristian Chavez and Russ Troeller are filling crucial roles as the team looks to make the most of the busy crossover season, delivering live coverage for such sports as men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s soccer, field hockey, and women’s lacrosse.

According to Hession, things are just getting started. He and the team hope to continue to build out the secondary production space to allow multiple full live productions and to bring even more live coverage to Temple sports in the 2021-22 season, when, hopefully, schedules return to a more traditional cadence.

“The main goals are to provide the best coverage possible and to grow that coverage year after year,” says Hession. “I want to keep it going and keep building. I think Temple and the AAC have given us the tools to accomplish that.”