Harvard Centralizes Its Control Rooms Through the Use of IP
By Adam Noyes
By Brandon Costa of SVG
The growth of college sports has expanded the field of video production. Segmenting an entire field of it’s own, sports media is as big of a market in the media landscape. With so many sports and a huge amount of colleges and universities participating, the schools are generally left on their own to provide the means of production for these events. Many of these institutions may not have a budget big enough to support anything groundbreaking to speak of, but a school like Harvard might. They do, of course, but that doesn’t mean they don’t look to trim cost where possible. After all, a budget is put in place to relieve costs in the first place. With the help of NewTek’s NDI technology, Harvard has been able to build a centralized control room for their sports production. At first glance this might not seem that impressive, but take into account that from this control room that they can be able to produce and monitor all of their sports activities across the campus. Rather than running miles of cabling they were able to tap into the network already put in place for general public use on campus the control room with the use of NDI receives the video from it’s source and they’re off and running. This proved to be an easy way to save money and use those resources to better their video production.
It was NewTek’s new NDI (Network Device Interface) technology that proved to be the game-changer for Halevi. Harvard, like many universities these days, has been investing a lot in connectivity for both general public-internet use and research-data transfer. So Halevi was fortunate enough to have a campus-wide Gigabit network already in existence. Although it wasn’t built for video transmission, he figured he could tag alone. The university gave him the okay.
For Halevi, IP is not an end but a means to achieve his ultimate goal of centralization. “IP is such an easy way to get there both in terms of labor/resources and in cost. I think that’s true for many universities. Dedicated fiber for video is something that you have to ask for and plan for. Internet is something that is top of mind for many schools for many reasons.
“If you can jump on that and be a part of that,” he continues, “that’s a good solution for anyone, especially with all of these IP-friendly solutions on the market now. There’s really nothing left that you can’t do over IP, which wasn’t the case one, two, three years ago.”
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