Mike Davies Explains Foxsports IBC Team's 50-Person World Cup Role
foxsports is centralizing much of its World Cup operation in Los Angeles, but a 50-person team is still working at the IBC to keep signals moving from 16 match venues to Pico. That setup leaves the broadcast center with more control while the IBC remains the handoff point for venue connections and remote production traffic.
Mike Davies on the IBC
Mike Davies said the IBC is still an essential IT hub because Fox Sports has to pick up connections to the 16 match venues without problems and feed the 6 BRISK kit signals back to the production control rooms in Pico. He said, "HBS likes to manage which providers can deliver IT services between the venue and the IBC, so we must be at IBC to be able to pick up those connections to the 16 match venues without any issues. This is still an essential IT hub for us to facilitate the 6 BRISK kit signals back to the production control rooms in Pico."
The 50-person group at the IBC handles Riedel comms, Sony camera shading, engineering, audio, and IT networking. It also receives signals from HBS and Fox remote production teams, manages them, and sends them onward to Pico, where HDR 1080P is the native format and the World Cup frame rate is 59.94.
Appear X20 and Pico paths
Fox Sports said this year's encoding is built around Appear X20, 60 JPEG-XS paths, and two 100 Gbps diverse circuits to Pico. The network also includes two 100 Gbps circuits to Tempe, AZ, and two 100Gbps circuits between Pico and Tempe, with traffic rerouted through Tempe if a path between Fox and Pico is lost.
That redundancy is paired with SMPTE 2022-7, so packet loss on either the red or blue circuits is not visible to viewers. Fox Sports also uses a disaster recovery gallery in New York, adding another layer to the transport chain that carries the World Cup feed out of the IBC.
Six BRISK systems in the field
The BRISK system, short for Broadcast Remote IP Studio Kit, is now in use six times in the field. Each unit is an 8-to-12 camera system deployed the day before a game at a match venue, and the production team in Pico can cut between shots from the venue and cameras from other stages from one production gallery.
Those systems were developed by Kevin Callahan and Doug McGee, designed by Diversified, and built in-house in the Fox warehouse in Vegas by Lucas Pierce and Aaron Stevens. Reporter cameras at pitch side use LiveU bonded cellular encoders racked remotely with CyanView Rio telemetry, which keeps the venue-side operation tied into the same remote-production workflow that runs through the IBC and into Pico.
