Earlier today, you may have caught a glimpse of All-Star Game batting practice on Fox Sports. If you did--you would have been watching online, where Fox Sports was doing a live stream of the event from AT&T Park in San Francisco. The live coverage marked a technological first for Fox Sports--and a first for baseball fans eager to soak up every last bit they could from afar. (A second behind-the-scenes Webcast is scheduled during the All-Star Game itself.)
Fox tapped NewTek's TriCaster TV studio-in-a-box to enable live streaming broadcasts from Fox's broadcast truck to Fox Sports and MLB.com. This afternoon, Philip Nelson, vice president of sales and video marketing at NewTek (yes, the same NewTek that started a video revolution with the release of the Video Toaster in 1990), gave me a peek at the TriCaster in action.
Inside the truck--one of many here at the truck compound just outside AT&T Park--the TriCaster is up and running. The relatively compact black box is dwarfed by the 16 flat-panel displays and other assorted equipment in the truck; however, it clearly is the focal point in how it's enabling much of the action around it. Fox is unusual, he adds, in that they've integrated the TriCaster intor their own production gear.
"The TriCaster is self-contained," notes Nelson. "It can simultaneously output to three things--video, digital signage, and a webcast. It's a 16-pound box that can do the key elements of a live TV truck. It can switch live video. We even support virtual sets, so if you're standing by a green screen, we can make it look like you're standing in the sky box."
They're rehearsing now--and I see how quickly the TriCaster operator is handling adding on-screen overlay graphics with a quick click. That's notable considering Fox didn't get the TriCaster in hand until midday Monday, little more than 24 hours before the batting practice would begin.
"Fox is live switching the Webcasting of batting practice. They're taking the output of that video into the TriCaster, where they're adding graphics and titles, and rolling in pre-edited video clips, before they stream the broadcast out to the Web," Nelson explains of the process in front of me.
Fox has six cameras set up to capture the action, including four locked down to specific locations, and two handheld cameras. Four personnel are manning the stations--including a technical director, audio mixer, producer, and the TriCaster operator.
The TriCaster's initial iteration shipped three years ago; the $9995 TriCaster Studio that Fox is using supports live switching among six cameras, both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios (in standard definition), and push/pull Windows Media with VC1 streaming support; it can render output as AVI, DV, MPEG-2, QuickTime, and MPEG-4 formats. What's significant about TriCaster, though, is that it has two other, more streamlined versions which start at $4995. Those prices are helping make professional studio production accessible to anyone with can pay this comparatively low price of entry to a filmmaking dream.
"TriCaster is being used in many different situations. We have sixth graders in Florida doing TV shows. We have Fortune 500 companies archiving meetings and presentations. And we see broadcasters creating content for the Web," says Nelson. "We're trying to empower people to create live Internet TV for less. People who've never made TV before can do it now. It's sort of like what LightWave 3D did for science fiction and special effects: People with great ideas and talent can now get in the door."
This evening's Webcast, during the All-Star Game, will show a behind-the-scenes view of how the all-star presentation is created. "It will show how a high-end television broadcast is created," says Nelson. The production crew has cameras inside the truck, to give viewers insight into the production process.
According to Jed Pearson, executive producer, video and broadband for Fox Sports, this type of webcast is only the start of things to come for Fox Sports. "We hope to use it as a plug-and-play device to Webcast college football games that will not be broadcast," reveals Pearson. "It's easy to produce, without the expense of a full truck and crew. And it gives fans the chance to see games they wouldn't see otherwise. [TriCaster] will let us produce remote broadcasts where it normally wouldn't be fiscally viable."
The appeal of this kind of Webcasting production goes beyond broadcasting specific events; rather, it offers a new, previously untapped way of covering events. "We can give fans access we've never been able to do in the past," says Pearson. The use of hand-held cameras during the batting practice, for example, "let us walk up to players when they're done, as they're joking around with each other."
