Harvard Students Game-Ready for Live Sports Production | NewTek
By Jim Bask
From NewTek
“If a production system is too complicated, it doesn’t really matter if it has amazing quality or a large number of inputs. If students can’t figure out how to use it quickly, then it’s really not for us.”
That’s the viewpoint Imry Halevi takes as Director of Multimedia and Production at Harvard University Athletics.
And he has 275 reasons why.
Ivy League Math
Harvard has more Division I sports teams than any other school in the country.
For each of those teams—except the ten that are not suited to live streaming, because of logistical challenges or site issues—the department is responsible for producing and broadcasting all home games.
That means his department covers 32 teams throughout the academic year.
With an athletic season that begins in late August and ends in early May, this tallies up to an annual average of 275 games to produce. Often, several at the same time.
Case in point: a recent winter weekend with enough sports programming to rival the PyeongChang Olympic games.
“On Friday, we had men’s and women’s track and field, men’s swimming and diving, women’s basketball, and women’s hockey,” says Halevi. “And Saturday, we had women’s tennis, women’s squash, men’s squash, men’s tennis, men’s swimming and diving, women’s swimming and diving, wrestling, women’s hockey, and women’s basketball.”
And this is where the math breaks down. Because there’s only one full-time professional on staff to produce these games—Halevi himself.
Like many college sports video programs, he enlists a rotating crew of interns, recent graduates, and part-time student assistants. To ensure the highest-quality coverage, even with a lot of beginners and frequent turnover, Halevi has developed a two-pronged approach:
- First, production equipment that new crew members can quickly learn to operate.
- And second, workflows implemented so instinctively that neither beginners nor experts have to think about the technology behind them.
For both, he turned to NewTek….[continue reading]