For example, this camera is so easy to just throw into your hands, point, and shoot. While it’s big brother (AG-CX350) might have more versatility for professional higher end productions, this camcorder has a great 24x optical zoom, can shoot up to 4Kp60, utilizes HDMI or SDI out, and even has built in XLR ports perfect for audio. As you can see in the picture below, you can even adjust the audio settings to what you need. very customization.

In other words, the built in XLR ports makes it easy to either just mount a shotgun mic onto the mic holster directly, or use a longer cable to plug in so your talent can hold the mic and do a proper interview. No more worrying about sync issues.

There is also a built in light on the camera that can be used to help keep your subjects lit in less than stellar lighting situations.

With a firmware update, this camera can even be used over NDI, bring in control and video over ethernet. This is an amazing asset for sports production as the camera roams up and down the bleachers to capture the audience, or even get good shots of the players on the field, maybe coach reactions.

Watch the full video here!

Learn more about Panasonic here!

Kids are getting full rides to top engineering schools because of their eSports abilities. Live streaming gameplay is a growth opportunity for our industry. We sell many products that allow you to stream your individual gameplay and even your own local eSports tournaments.

Morgan Stanely: Have eSports Hit the Majors?

eSports is on track to be a $1.5 billion industry by 2020 as it emulates the business models of major league sports, complete with sponsorships, advertising, media rights, ticket sales and merchandise.

In arenas around the world, people are paying top dollar to see their favorite elite players and teams in action, while millions of global viewers watch from afar. These competitions have all the same elements of traditional sporting events with one nuance: Players connect passes and strike their opponents with handheld video game controllers, and rarely do they leave their chairs.

Old-school sports fans may roll their eyes, but eSports—professional video gaming—is gaining traction as a spectator sport, garnering ticket sales, attracting major sponsorships and grabbing a growing share of advertising dollars. The segment is organizing around professional teams and leagues, many of them run by same high-profile owners of traditional major league sports. read more…

NHL becomes latest sporting league to join eSports

The NHL has unveiled its first foray into esports — the 2018 NHL Gaming World Championship.

The $100,000 US tournament will feature separate online qualifying events in Canada, the U.S. and Europe with each region sending two finalists to the 2018 NHL Gaming Final set for June 19 in Las Vegas.

The winner will claim the championship trophy, collect a cash prize of $50,000 and take part in the 2018 NHL Awards show.

The NHL sees the virtual hockey tournament as just its opening esports salvo, with member teams likely to develop their own esports opportunities down the line. But in organizing the inaugural world championship, the aim is to allow as many people to get involved as possible. read more…

Forget the Super Bowl, esports may be the spectator sport of the future

As industry experts speculate about traditional sports’ waning popularity, the $1.5 billion dollar pro gaming – or eSports – industry looks more and more poised to steal some of their spotlight. Born out of living room LAN parties, and then esoteric conventions, eSports is now a worldwide network of pro gaming tournaments and leagues, with legitimate teams boasting international followings and lucrative sponsorships.

And much of world is taking notice. Media giants like ESPN and Turner have begun broadcasting eSports tournaments and Amazon paid nearly $1 billion in 2014 for the live streaming eSports video platform Twitch. More recently, even YouTube and Facebook have sought to contest control of the live streaming eSports broadcasting market. read more…

“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]

From NewTek blog

The action in esports takes place on a computer or game console display, sometimes many displays. Putting a live camera on an esports contestant doesn’t translate the same as it does with athletic sports. Traditional video production equipment does not adapt readily or cheaply to ingesting video game content, often requiring expensive hardware signal convertors and cabling. Sometimes it requires an additional system for each game computer involved.

Yahoo Esports recently took a look at how NewTek is addressing both ends of that process, with software that enables gaming systems to send their screens across the network, and production systems that ingest IP in addition to the traditional dedicated video signal cable types (also called “baseband”), such as SDI. They explore how esports media titan Twitch TV is using those solutions to scale up operations and audience while containing costs.

The key technology is NewTek’s NDI, an IP solution for video transport. “NDI lets us send signals between hardware without things like capture cards and cables,” Josh Shaw, producer and technical director at Twitch, explained.

…[continue reading]

It’s not often that improvements in technology make something not only easier to accomplish, but less expensive too. However, that’s precisely the case with the low-latency digital-transmission solutions now available to sport and media organisations looking to produce and broadcast more live events from remote locations.

“Until now, a satellite truck, on-site production equipment and a host of skilled people were needed to broadcast live events,” says Malcolm Harland, Managing Director of UK-based digital solutions provider Garland. “Connectivity limitations and the delay in delivering live video globally meant that the final produced programme needed to be done at the event location before being broadcast for onward delivery to the home site.

“But that’s all now changed with technological innovations such as wireless transmission over multiple global 4G cellular networks and ultra-low latency delivery. Now, if you want to showcase an event far from your home base, technology within reach financially is making it easier, with less equipment and fewer people needed onsite.

Charlton Athletic Football Club provides an excellent example of this new technology being put to use by an organisation where budget was a consideration. The club travelled to Ireland as part of its pre-season tour and, for the first time, streamed live game coverage to its fans. It was an option that had previously been financially impossible for the club given the high cost of hiring a broadcast truck. The use of solutions from LiveU made it not only fit within their budget constraints, but also allowed them to broadcast with the level of quality they knew their fans were expecting. By using cellular networks, the club also did not have to depend on local connectivity.

“Using LiveU broadcast kits, we were able to beam back two camera feeds from Ireland to a gallery in London where a final feed could be mixed with graphics, replays and VT links,” says Steve Adamson, Audio Visual Content Editor at Charlton…..[continue reading]

The NFL’s New York Giants vice president of Entertainment, Don Sperling, has been a leader in seeing this shift and adjusting the team’s content production to meet it over the past 11 years. A key to that effort has been using NewTek’s TriCaster multi-camera live production and streaming system, to cost-effectively supply network-quality content via the website and social media. The results have been spectacular:

“Over the course of last year, we had almost 76 million views on Facebook and between Sept. 1 and Dec. 31, we had almost 48 million of those 76 million happen during the season. So compare that to TV … I can tell you that the difference between them is monstrous.” – Don Sperling, VP of Entertainment, NY Giants….

Click here to read the full article on NewTek

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.”

Click here to read the full article.