Live from Dublin: ESPN moves goal posts for college football season opener

ESPN aired its College GameDay show live from Dublin city centre (Picture: NEP Ireland)

Host city Dublin staged the Aer Lingus College Football Classic on Saturday 24 August for the Week Zero season-opening game between Georgia Tech and Florida State University at the Aviva Stadium. Host broadcaster ESPN’s College GameDay show aired directly from Dame Street in Dublin city centre, the first time the pre-game show has been broadcast from outside the US.

ESPN implemented a remote production model for the first time for the Aviva match broadcast and also introduced its first deployment of cloud-based SuperMo replay with two SSMO cameras in the REMI game format. On Saturday TG4 became the first Irish broadcaster to screen the match live on free-to-air television in Ireland. It was also the first college football match in Ireland to feature the Ross SpiderCam aerial cabled cam system, capturing the line of scrimmage from above the pitch at the Aviva Stadium.

The 2024 Aer Lingus College Football Classic was a 47,000 ticket sell-out, with over 25,000 Americans travelling from the US to attend the match. The event has become a major milestone in the Irish sporting calendar, enhancing tourism and boosting the local economy to the tune of roughly €180 million each August.

Commenting on the REMI production and cloud-based replay overlay on match day-1, ESPN executive director remote operations John LaChance tells SVG Europe: “It’s a dual collaborative effort between the infrastructure here and back at our base in Bristol [Connecticut], and it’s working well. We have done the Aer Lingus Classic multiple times now, but this is our first time as a remote integrated telecast. We do many REMIs, but the uniqueness here is that it’s international and integrating from Dublin represents a challenge.”

Pitchside at the Aviva one hour before Week Zero kickoff

“ESPN GameDay is live for the first time outside the United States, with a more traditional production model in College Green,” adds ESPN operations specialist Kevin Cleary. “Dublin’s a great place for it, along with the Aer Lingus Classic which is a fantastic event.

“The Irish fans and all the fans that come from America really get that Week Zero show. It’s unlike anything else when it comes to the pride that folks have in coming here to support their team. TG4 is broadcasting the game for the first time in Gaelic, so the Irish-speaking public can now enjoy the occasion as well.

“There’s a significant portion of our show that utilises not only cloud-based servers but also direct internet connection that goes back and forth. We have our IPMC encoders on-site. One of the larger challenges is distribution here locally: we are a 1080p show and the local broadcaster, TG4, is 1080i.

“Also, the individual signals back to Bristol are encoded with audio channels because our announcers are on-site. So we have an A1 here to manage all processing of signals and embedding of audio channels, and working on our comms. We do remote tallies from Bristol to here and we also have a Unity comms connect. Our clock and score and our telestrator are all in the REMI model established for college football.”

“Individually we have 20 1080p paths of outbound transmission and five 1080i inbound transmission,” he continues, “and that is our program for distribution and monitoring with camera return and an inbound signal that feeds ESPN GameDay to the house pre-match, so that the folks that are here can see the GameDay show.

“There are two 1080p 4x super slomos with all four phases of each going into a Riedel Venue Gateway we brought here, connecting to an AWS workflow to Bristol. It’s the first time we’ve integrated cloud-based super slomo on college football and the first time we’ve done it internationally,” said Cleary.

The individual phases from each SSMO camera were encoded to SRT via the Venue Gateway encoder to AWS Elemental MediaConnect in the Dublin AWS region. The AWS Elemental MediaConnect in Dublin then connected to AWS Elemental MediaConnect in the US-East region and the individual phases were decoded in two Riedel ViBox servers deployed in US-East.

Two replay operators located in Bristol connected to the servers to control and operate super-mo replay, with two outputs coming down to Bristol’s transmission department for integration into the REMI production. ESPN PCR personnel utilised file transfer workflows to push pre-edits to the server and melt clips to the Bristol archive. By utilising AWS resources in both Dublin and Virginia, video transport latency was reduced from site to the AWS data centres and control latency was reduced for the operators in Bristol.

NEP delivers Dublin venues for ESPN OBs

Georgia Tech was designated the home team for the Aer Lingus Classic and used the stadium’s home locker room. Match production featured eight Sony HDC 3500 hard cams, one Sony HDC 3500 cabled HH beauty cam; two field hand-held Sony HDC 3500 radio/RF HH cams; a Panasonic PTZ Hot Head for in-cam commentary; two Sony HDC 3500/2500 cameras for play & match clock; and three Marshall POV/pencil cams for coaches booths/talent snoop.

In addition, for the first time on college football, a Ross SpiderCam operated in the stadium plus a drone system flew outside, supplied by Upshot Productions and managed on-site by John McMahon. On the SpiderCam were four Sony P43-H cameras with Newton S2 NH25 remote heads. The SpiderCam Control Station located in the media tribune area served as the master control unit of the aerial system, controlling the movement of the four SpiderCam winches via Ethernet over fibre cables. Motion control, error handling and a safety report were updated in real-time between winches and the control unit. The control station was also the link between the SpiderCam spar and the OB unit.

Four sideline parabolic dish pitch microphones were in action to capture atmos. The sideline cart was supplied by Chapman Leonard UK. The official replay service was provided by regular NCAA college football contractor DVSport.

All match coverage cameras along with program net return were made available by host broadcaster ESPN to TG4 in 1080p 59.94. Standards and format conversions were the responsibility of TG4.

The play-by-play commentator for ESPN was Joe Tessitore accompanied by analyst Jessie Palmer. In the OB unit front row were John LaChance, Kevin Cleary and coordinating producer Bryan Jaroch, supported by Tim Bischhof for REMI audio/comms and senior operations coordinator Kylene Hamulak in the rear of the NEP Spirit truck.

At the Aviva Stadium: (L-R): Alan Burns, project director NEP Ireland; Kevin Cleary, operations specialist ESPN; John LaChance, executive director remote production operations ESPN; Kylene Kamulak, senior operations coordinator ESPN; and Adam Scarff, tech project manager NEP Ireland

“This is the first time ESPN has done a full REMI here,” Adam Scarff, NEP tech project manager for ESPN, tells SVG Europe. “From here we’ve got 20 outgoing lines with the match cameras and a snoop pencil camera. All the match replays are done away from here so there are no EVS here at all for the broadcast. There are 15 live match cameras, which is typical enough, with commentary on-site. All the pre-game analysis is done at ESPN GameDay in College Green and they throw straight to commentary here for the match.

“NEP Spirit is the match truck here in the Aviva for ESPN. Because there’s no EVS or graphics it can have a smaller footprint and they’re happy with that mid-tier truck. OBS1 has come from the UK to do sports pres for the big screens in the stadium, and our Emerald OB is for TG4 unilateral production.

“Our big Lir truck is in College Green doing the ESPN GameDay show. That is a hybrid production, with producers, director and EVS in the truck in Dublin, and graphics added in Bristol. It’s all done on satellite. It’s a three-hour live show leading directly up to the match broadcast.”

Read more Live from Dublin: First for Ireland as TG4 broadcasts College Football Classic

NEP company CT Ireland provided the PA system in College Green with Irish lighting company Hi Res looking after lighting, along with several drones from John McMahon’s Upshot Productions.

“Our OBS1 truck is doing a different production in the stadium, completely standalone with DVSport,” says Scarff. “They have four cameras here and two EVS replays as well. Anything on the ribbons and fullscreen splashes happens from the Daktronics show controller and everything else comes from our truck, including the Kiss Cam or any of the graphics, so the camera operators can see the return. It’s fun, but it’s busy and difficult because the time-outs are your busy times. From an EVS point of view it’s hard work, and once the crowd starts coming in it is non-stop.

“I’ve been involved in all the College Football matches here since 2012 and NEP have done all of them, including supplying the videoboard facilities for every match, which is great continuity. We have a fantastic relationship with ESPN, and with John and Kevin in particular.”

“This a real success story for the country as well. Last year was the biggest mass movement of US citizens to Europe since the Normandy landings. This year is completely sold out again, so it’s a great event,” says Scarff.

“One of the [REMI] benefits is that our production team can be in Bristol,” adds Cleary, “where they have the in-house fixed environment and fixed space, taking the cameras in with, in our testing, a round-trip delay of a little bit more than two seconds – which is certainly within tolerance to put on a great show.

“Personally, this is my third Aer Lingus Classic, and I feel like we get better every year with the refinements and the different technologies. As the television business moves farther and farther into being more of a technology business and less of a baseband television workflow, for me this is probably the best one yet.”

“We would not have all of these elements coming together without the fine support of NEP and our unit manager Adam Scarff with leadership from Alan Burns,” adds LaChance. “Plus the support from the folks at the Aviva Stadium for something that is very logistically challenging. They make our job just that much better every time we come here.”