The Chase Center remote working during Covid

When we can do anything we want with our system through browser-accessible interfaces, it means we can do it from anywhere. The entire media fabric is like one giant crosspoint, with access to all the media conversions we need on the fly. Configuration changes can be made, from home, at a moment’s notice.

We have giant LED screens inside the arena, of course, but also outside the building, facing onto the Thrive City Plaza at Chase Center. To get the best out of the outdoor screens, we run everything in-house at 1080p/59.94, which we also use to feed the 1100+ other screens in the facility.

But we routinely swap content with visiting broadcast trucks, which might be 1080i or 720p. They take some cameras from us; we take some feeds from them. So we use Imagine Selenio Network Processors (SNP) to bridge SDI and IP and convert frame rates, spatial resolutions and colour spaces if necessary.

During the COVID-19 shutdown, while most staff are working from home, the video functionality in Chase Center is still busy. Chase Center was a drop-off point for ballots in the recent election, so the outdoor displays showed voter information, or the latest coronavirus advice, or material for the farmers’ markets regularly held in the plaza. We even had a television show shooting in the plaza, and our displays became part of the show.

All of this was set up and controlled remotely, thanks to our IP and IT infrastructure.  Correction and adjustment of camera formats and audio track layouts and routing – it can all be controlled remotely.

Going SMPTE ST 2110 with a COTS core was definitely the right choice. We have the freedom to route any source to any destination, to handle any sort of content, and to control it from wherever we need to be.