To See how new technology will affect TV coverage of the 2020 elections, look at the new Telemundo Center in Miami.
The facility’s design goal was to bring all the company’s original production units under one roof “to get the collaborative benefit of having the various production teams side by side,” NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises senior vice president of operations and technology Jeff Mayzurk said.
Over a three-year planning and construction process, Mayzurk’s teams quickly realized that traditional broadcast and production technologies wouldn’t help Telemundo achieve its goals.
“The scale of this facility would have been impossible in an SDI world,” said Mayzurk, referring to the Serial Digital Interface (SDI) standard that has long been used to move video within broadcast facilities.
To avoid that problem, Mayzurk and his team decided to go all-internet protocol, which allowed them to connect all the devices, sets, cameras and other technologies to one network. This IP network currently has nearly 10,000 Ethernet ports and can handle 150,000 multicast flows, providing enormous flexibility to add new equipment or reconfigure existing studios, cameras or other devices.
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The facility also relies on cloud-based production technologies, which can be easily expanded or reconfigured, and cutting-edge automation to more easily revamp sets and production studios to add new programs. The result is a game-changer for creating news content.
“We can maintain a very high level of quality but at a lower cost point,” Mayzurk said. “A lot of news orgnizations are struggling with the fact that they have to produce more content and increase cover-age but budgets aren’t growing. This allows us to do much more with less.”
