Johannesburg, 21 May 2010
US-based sports broadcaster ESPN has signed a deal with Cisco to bring sports interviews during the World Cup to its viewers using telepresence.
The two rooms, one in Port Elizabeth (PE) and the other in Cape Town, cost around $80 000 each for the Cisco equipment, and will link back to the International Broadcasting Centre (IBC), in Johannesburg.
“They can do player interviews in the rooms and transmit it back to their studios in Bristol, Connecticut,” says David Hsieh, VP of Cisco sports marketing.
Speaking during a telepresence media briefing yesterday, ESPN VP Rob Hunter explained the decision to bring these two rooms to SA was made to bring down the cost of remote broadcasting from PE and Cape Town.
“It is cheaper to have the rooms than to truck in a remote broadcasting truck for the matches held in those cities,” he explained.
Hunter said the savings are around $20 000 per interview, adding that it made sense to partner with Cisco.
In addition to the rooms, ESPN has implemented a wired broadband pipe between the IBC, in Johannesburg, and its own broadcasting headquarters in Bristol, which can carry capacity of up to 650Mbps.
The sports broadcaster is building two other rooms in the US, one that will be completed this week in New York, and another that will be completed in two weeks' time in Chicago.
According to Hunter, for the first time, the three arms of the company that will cover SA's World Cup will broadcast everything in high-definition.
It is not yet clear what ESPN will be doing with the two SA rooms once the World Cup is over. However, Cisco's local head, David Meads, says the company is fighting to keep the technology at the stadiums for local sports broadcasting use.
Cisco has already kitted out seven of the 10 stadiums with IP and voice hardware, and has implemented video technologies in local airports so that tourists know when they land they are about to experience a soccer fest.
Many of the technologies implemented around SA are multipurpose, so they can be redeployed for another use.
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