New England Sports Network's new HD facility

In February 2006, The New England Sports Network (NESN) relocated to a new facility in Watertown, MA. The original facility, based in Boston’s famed Fenway Park, was becoming too small for this fast growing network.

A new 40,000sq-ft facility was designed to accommodate their rapidly growing sports coverage in the New England region of professional, college and high school teams. These teams include the Boston Celtics, the Boston Red Sox, the Boston Bruins and the New England Patriots.

NESN’s new facility consolidates operations around a centrally located core of technical rooms. The technical core rests on a raised computer fl oor with 1ft of usable space below, allowing for easy access and room for future expansion. The equipment racks are Middle Atlantic 36in deep cabinets. At the heart of the system in the central equipment room is an all-digital NVISION 128 x 128 SDI/2X AES router, an RTS ADAM intercom matrix system, as well as supporting modular products from Leitch, Evertz and Miranda. The QC station uses a Videotek rasterizer and Wohler AES audio monitor.

The two production studios, one 50ft x 50ft studio and a 40ft x 50ft studio, with Sony HDC910 cameras and a 192 circuit lighting system, installed by Barbizon, produce from multiple venues for post game shows, as well as from the NESN sports news desk.

Two production and audio control rooms support the studios. These audio control rooms are built around two Solid State Logic 32-fader, fi ve-bay C100 mixing consoles. The production control rooms each have a monitor wall, front and rear production consoles. The two production control rooms share a multiformat four M/E Sony MVS-8000A with built in DVE, two Chyron HyperX CGs. A single shading room feeds both production control rooms and has the capability to support up to 12 cameras.

NESN now broadcasts both in HD and SD from one master control room using two NV5128 master control switchers containing one HD channel and three SD channels. All of the control rooms are supported by two Evertz 48-input MVP systems, allowing for virtual monitor walls.

The tape control room houses two Sony HDCAMs, one Sony DVCAM, five Sony Betacam machines, a Grass Valley two-channel server and an EVS HD XT2 two-channel disk recorder. The operators for the tape control room sit at a freestanding four-bay TBC console with an EVS server station, KVM and QC position.

NESN’s new facilities enable optimal ease of operations, while giving viewers an enhanced experience for all of their favorite New England sports events.