A Deep Dive Inside Game Creek Video’s Bird and Magic Mobile Units, Home to Amazon’s ‘NBA on Prime Video’

Prime is also using GCV Encore as studio-control room and master-control center

When Amazon Prime Video inked a massive 11-year deal for NBA media rights in July 2024, it tapped Game Creek Video — which also built the streamer’s Prime One and Two mobile units for Thursday Night Football — to build and design a new arsenal of production facilities. GCV’s mission ended up being threefold: build one mobile unit for Prime Video’s East Coast NBA game productions and an identical unit for the West Coast and reappropriate its existing Encore mobile unit to serve as a central production hub at the streamer’s new studios in Culver City, CA.

Game Creek Video’s Magic mobile unit handle west-coast games for the NBA on Prime Video.

“We met with the Amazon Prime team weekly over the course of a year [prior to the builds] to nail down their specific requirements,” says Keith Martin, director, technology, Game Creek Video. “They were looking for a flexible and powerful ST 2110 ecosystem. We ultimately came to them — [utilizing] our learnings from 2110[-based] trucks over the past few years — and put together a system based on those specifications.”

The resulting mobile units — aptly named Bird and Magic for their respective East Coast and West Coast NBA game-production roles — are among the most advanced mobile units Game Creek has ever rolled out. The real challenge for the manufacturer was packing all the technical firepower of its largest ST 2110–based mobile units into a two-chassis form factor that could easily pull into NBA arenas’ truck compounds for single-day set/shoot/strike operations.

“It’s a delicate balance to strike,” says Martin. “We want to pack a ton of technical power into these trucks, but, if you can’t deploy them quickly and efficiently for the job they need to do, what good are they?”

All About Automation: Leveling Up the Power-Up Process

As the project began to take shape, one thing became clear to Martin and his team: the power-up/boot-up process for the highly complex 2110-based mobile units needed to be heavily streamlined and simplified.

Game Creek Video’s Bird mobile unit, built to cover the NBA on the East Coast, has a twin in Magic on the West Coast.

“One of the bugs we’ve come across in these big 2110 IP systems is that you can’t just turn them on and have them working in five minutes,” says Jason Taubman, SVP, technology, Game Creek Video. “You can’t throw the breaker and stand back and wait for things to happen; you need to do things very meticulously in a particular order.”

For previous 2110 trucks, he notes, engineering teams would have to, first, get the IP network up and running, bring the PTP time-sync system online, and incrementally start powering on the various aspects of the production one by one. “It’s an extremely complex and time-consuming procedure. So one of the big areas we focused on was automating that power-up process.”

The solution came in the form of the Legrand switched PRO4X three-phase power-distribution unit (PDU), which programmatically handles each step in the power-up chain with minimal (or no) engineer intervention required.

“The PDU scripting [feature] significantly shortens the boot-up time for the whole system,” says Taubman. “Effectively, we’ve scripted the process to the point where you can basically turn it on, go get a cup of coffee, and come back in 20 minutes. That not only helps when we show up and don’t have a full set day but also helps if there is any sort of power anomaly.”

Martin explains, “We bring all three [phases] of power that are coming into the truck and distribute that across the various systems. We’re able to deliver 220-V power directly to many of the switching power supplies that exist in all the devices throughout the truck. We can lean on that to balance the power load across the whole truck and predictably understand our power needs.”

This also reduces electrical-current draw in the truck, which translates into better cooling performance and significantly reduce heat throughout both the A and B units.

Identical Twins: Bird and Magic Mirror Each Other on Opposite Coasts

Bird and Magic are essentially carbon copies, dividing the country with Bird on the East Coast and Magic on the West Coast. This allows the two facilities not only to avoid crisscrossing the country but also to produce doubleheaders on most Fridays from opposite coasts.

Like other recent Game Creek units, Bird and Magic (seen here) feature a variety of flex-space workstations that can be used for a variety of positions, including graphics and replay.

“One of the things that was really important to the Prime team early on was that these two facilities were in lockstep,” says Martin. “Because you have different teams doing different shows on the same day from two different locations throughout the season, they wanted to ensure that whatever was possible in one facility was also possible in the other. We took that approach in how we built them and how we staffed the project-management side.”

The respective A units house a large engineering room and the video-routing core, an extra-large production room featuring a Grass Valley K-Frame-XP switcher (192×96 via ST2110), and a turned-sideways audio room featuring a Calrec ARGO Q surround-sound console (96×96 analog, 128×128 waves, 16384×16384 ST 2110-30) powered by ImPulse.

The B units are divided into four distinct spaces, all with flexible sandbox workstations connected via the Adder ADDERLink INFINITY KVM platform. They house the rest of the technical positions, including video, replay, and graphics. Replay features up to eight 12-channel EVS XT-VIA’s and two Spotboxes. The camera complement on Bird and Magic comprises up to 16 Sony HDC-5500’s in parallel SDI and ST 2110 workflows and 16 Sony HDC-5500’s via ST 2110.

Inside the Trucks: Lawo, Riedel Play Key Role in Bringing It All Together

Both mobile units are built around a 400G Lawo/Arista ST 2110 IP backbone featuring a pair of Arista 7500R3 modular switches (a 7512 switch for the A unit, a 7504 switch for the B unit).

Bird and Magic, which both feature Calrec audio consoles, are designed to be extensions of the NBA on Prime studio facility.

Like Game Creek’s recent Flagship (ESPN’s Monday Night Football fleet) and Ovation (FOX Sports’ NFL A-game fleet), Bird and Magic rely heavily on Lawo’s VSM and HOME IP-broadcast-management platforms to handle the sophisticated ST 2110 infrastructure.

In addition, like Flagship and Ovation, Bird and Magic have Riedel Artist intercom systems, which were specifically requested by Prime Video. The move to Riedel not only provides additional functionality compared with legacy systems, but it removes the need to set aside discrete signal paths for the intercom within the ST 2110 IP environment.

The A units feature VSM Control, 592×556 Lawo .edge, and/or Riedel Fusion3 SDI gateway plus 48/192 UHD/3G UDX and 512×128 Lawo HOMEApps UHD multiviewer via IP. Additionally, up to 512×1024 expandable remote IPG I/O is possible. Audio-signal routing is handled by Lawo PowerCore Audio (96×96 analog, 96×96 AES, 20×20 MADI, 1536×1536 Dante).

The B units feature VSM Control, 240×326 Lawo .edge, and/or Riedel Fusion3 SDI gateway; additionally, up to 256×512 expandable remote IPG I/O is possible. Audio-signal routing is handled by Lawo PowerCore Audio (64×64 analog, 8×8 MADI, 1024×1024 Dante).

Lawo VSM, the overall control system, interfaces with pushbutton panels for source and destination routing, and HOME, sitting in the middle of the ecosystem, connects to all the Lawo-native devices — most notably, the multiviewer app. HOME also acts as a consumer of NMOS RDS [Registration and Discovery Server Services], allowing it to pull in all the other third-party–vendor devices into the system.

“HOME has a nice little button in VSM that’s just called ‘add to matrix,’” says Martin. “You push the button, and it [provides] all the information published about a particular signal. Where we once had to manually create those signals by dragging and dropping SDP files, we can now push one button and have it pull all that information in automatically. It has been a huge step forward for us.”

Other key gear includes Meinberg LANTIME M1000 time-sync systems, Telestream SPG9000 timing/reference systems, a variety of Leader video-test/measurement scopes (including Zen 5600’s and 7600’s for engineering and utility use and 5350’s for shading positions), TSL audio monitors, and all Boland UHD HDR video monitors (there are UHD multiviewer outputs to every monitor throughout both mobile units).

Encore, Encore: Game Creek’s Veteran IP Unit Finds Second Life

Prime Video’s technical-ops team is currently in the early planning stages on permanent production facilities to power all its live sports productions (not just the NBA) at its Culver City Studios. In the meantime, GCV has transformed its powerful Encore mobile unit into a mini broadcast center on wheels to serve Prime’s NBA needs this season. Encore serves not only as the production-control room for the NBA on Prime studio but is also home to all ingest, storage, and encode/decode needs.

Game Creek Video Encore, here onsite in Atlanta for FOX Sports, has been temporarily repurposed as a mini broadcast center for Prime.

The Prime Video and Game Creek engineering teams revamped it to serve the unique needs of the NBA on Prime studio. Coming off its NFL on FOX stint and its final Super Bowl before being replaced by Ovation, Encore was parked at Culver City. Although it was already a high-end mobile unit, Game Creek and Prime Video made a handful of key changes.

“Prime has added a Riedel Intercom system to be compatible with Bird and Magic and their own Sony cameras, which they purchased in advance of integrating their studio,” Taubman explains. “Otherwise, Encore is pretty much the same as it was with FOX  — just fired up 24/7 and doing a different kind of work for Amazon out in Culver City.

“When we build trucks,” he continues, “we aren’t really thinking about them doing studio- or master-control work. So we also reorganized the workflow and workstation layout. For the most part, though, Encore was ready to go and has been a seamless workflow thus far. “

NBA on Prime Video studio shows are relying on Game Creek Video’s Encore mobile unit as its production control room.

One Hell of a Run: 11 Trucks in 12 Months

Game Creek Video’s shop in Hudson, NH, is always bustling with new truck builds, but 2025 took it to the extreme. A run of 11 trailer builds in 2025 produced Flagship A, B, C, and Office; Ovation A, B, and C; Bird A and B; and Magic A and B.

“I couldn’t be prouder of the team and the way they came together,” says Martin. “The teams here in Hudson putting the systems together — whether it was wiring, systems architecture, or project management — were incredible in terms of keeping the systems in lockstep and getting through this last 12 months.

“Honestly,” he continues, “just the fact that we survived it is a feat in and of itself. The fact that we were able to get these incredibly powerful facilities out with near zero drama is a testament to the talent and commitment of our team.”

With the company’s record run of new trucks in the books, all eyes are on what 2026 holds for GCV.

“All of the work we’ve done over the past year sets the stage for some of the really cool big developments coming [in 2026],” says Taubman. “We made a lot of great strides on the automation, and we want to continue to lean into that to more rapidly deploy these high-quality systems. It’s exciting to take everything we’ve just learned and start to apply that knowledge and experience so we can start pushing boundaries even further.”