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Sportsnet stays ahead of the gameSportsnet stays ahead of the gameSportsnet staysahead of the gamewith QuantelOver the last 15 years, Sportsnet has risen to become one ofCanada’s leading sports media operations. The Sportsnet andSportsnet One TV channels are complemented by SportsnetRadio, Sportsnet Magazine and its premium international sportschannel, Sportsnet World. In May 2013, parent companyRogers Media also acquired Score Media, owner of The ScoreTelevision Network, further extending its reach in the sportsbroadcasting market. For the last five years, Sportsnet has beenrelying on a Quantel Enterprise sQ system for all its productionneeds. Over this period, the system has not only handledSportsnet’s full workload, but also accommodated a doublingof operational requirements.Scoring with HockeyIce Hockey – regarded by many as Canada’s nationalsport – is at the heart of Sportsnet’s offering. Forthose who haven’t seen ice hockey, it is one of themost physically demanding of sports, with playersfrequently taking a pounding on a level with what aheavyweight boxer might expect.It’s an exciting, all action game that commandsa huge TV audience for Sportsnet. Sportsnet alsocovers baseball, basketball, American Football andsoccer. Sportsnet also took a share in 2012 LondonOlympics coverage and will be a partner in the 2014Winter Olympics coverage at Sochi in Russia.VP Operations and Engineering, Virginia Gibberd,explains Sportsnet’s approach: “Hockey is thebusiness driver for Sportsnet. We go head to headwith CBC (Canada’s state broadcaster) and oftenbeat them on multiple games nights.“A big part of our philosophy is that if you get allthe content – digital, magazine, radio – then theaudience can all benefit to the maximum. Ourbusiness model is national and regional – CRTC (theCanadian broadcasting regulatory body) regulatesthat we support regional as well as national events.”Planning paysSportsnet shared premises with CTV in Torontountil 2008. Three years of research and planningculminated in Sportsnet’s move into its spacious,purpose-designed premises at The Rogers Building -One Mount Pleasant - in downtown Toronto in April2008. Director of Technical Operations, AndrewThomas, remembers it well – he led the Operationsteam that made all the workflow decisions.“The team that designed One Mount Pleasant –known to everyone here as OMP – started researchin 2005, and the first thing we chose was the editsystem that would be at the heart of the workflow.We wanted a central ingest, edit, production andplayout solution – all in HD,” Thomas recalls. “Aspart of the selection process, we looked at severalmanufacturers’ systems in use with other customers.Included in this process were visits to the Quantelinstallations at ESPN in Bristol, CT and Fox in LA – tosee how they supported highlights packages andhigh end productions in a single solution. Quantelwas the only system that could do what we wanted.”Frank Bruno Rogers VP of TV Engineering states theEnterprise SQ system is the heart of Sportsnet.“A critical design element was the integration of thissystem to multiple third party systems. Quantel’s R&Dteam worked closely with Vizrt, Autocue, Dixon Sports,Harris Automation and Rogers Corporate IT to ensure allthese systems communicated with each other reliably. Thiswas a fundamental requirement towards new and efficientOperational workflows,” Bruno says.Starting over“What was great about starting from scratch at OMP wasthat we were able to throw out old workflows and start afresh.Sometimes it’s easier to change people’s lives completelyrather than piecemeal,” Thomas continues.The scale of the Sportsnet operation is mind-boggling – asare the production demands that it supports. At the heartof the system is 2000 hours of 1080i HD storage on sQ“There’s a wonderfulsimplicity to sQ Edit…it caters for a range of verydifferent editing styles”Chris Moskavec: Editorservers, which are split into two zones to provide operationalredundancy. The system includes 84 sQ View desktop shotselection and review applications, 11 sQ Edit advancededitors and six sQ Edit Plus HD craft editors. Between 150and 250 hours of new footage are recorded into the systemdaily, across a total of 40 ports on the Enterprise sQ systemunder the control of Vizrt DART. ENG crews send their editedmaterial back to Sportsnet via ftp, which is transcoded usingRhozet and then transferred into the sQ server. Similarly,edited material in Enterprise sQ is exported via ftp to Rhozetfor transcoding for Sportsnet’s websites.