Just wanted to take a moment and thank those that watched our broadcasts this year of both Bobcat men's and women's basketball. Both the coaching and support staffs are great to work with, and the administration has been outstanding as well. For those who don't know, the games are a student production, ably assisted by instructor Don Moore, and Jason Chiappino, Assistant Athletic Director for Video Productions. In my second year covering Bobcat athletics, I admire the passion you all have for the teams. It certainly helps keeps us on our toes! I thought we took a step forward this year with our efforts, and we all are looking forward to 2018-19!!

Marty yes you did an excellent job, and I really enjoyed the times that I listened to you -- either when you did the radio broadcasts and I was listening with my earpiece when I was at the game, or the few times I heard one of your ESPN broadcasts when I was not in attendance. Great job! You and your team add a real professional touch to our broadcast team that stands out among our MAC peers, as RJ, said so correctly.

You (both) did a great job. Very glad to have you broadcasting for the Bobcats.

Well said sir. +1

Seconded (although I do miss seeing some of stuff that goes on at the Convo during timeouts). There are a lot of R-TV and other communications grads on this board so we tend to be highly critical of broadcasts. The quality of Bobcat broadcasts is outstanding. Very professional and without the home team bias seen on some of the other teams' broadcasts.

My one real complaint with ESPN3 is the repetition in their ads and promos. I am so sick of that jerk on the Addiction Network spots. I'm sure they're dropped in where ESPN doesn't have a real paid ad. Maybe as the thing takes off more of the spots will be filled with other advertisers and the repetition will subside.

The quality of the program is such that I don't even consider going to an away game and on one or two occasions didn't even go to the Convo even though I'm less than 10 minutes away. A very good job indeed folks.

And after typing that and coming back to reread it, is a scary thought in terms of the continued viability of a $450+ ticket.

Just want people to know all that Marty does for the students behind the scenes, he's a pro's pro and is an amazing guy to work with. I've learned so much from him in his two years here. We're all very lucky to have Marty around!

Come on Alan Swank! I would think that as much basketball as you have seen that you would understand how difficult the task of building and maintaining a program at or near the top really is. It certainly is no time to bail out on the team and program that you claim to support! If times are tough, I have some extra tickets I can send your way! Go Bobats!

My bad Alan! I missed the point on your post! We will both be back in the Convo next season!

Hi,

I 'm putting this here, as it's a better fit than following up on points raised about the installation of a new scoreboard at the Convo.

First, I'll echo the job well done sentiments on your production efforts, just need more W's. ESPN3 is a great opportunity, but can also be large-scale abuse of non-Power 5 schools.

I work with athletics at North Florida (ASUN) for ESPN3 production of what began as volleyball and m/w basketball and in now expanding into baseball. I jumped as this 4-years ago to give my students this opportunity. Our crew is either volunteer or getting class credit. It was easy to sell athletics on the free labor model. UNF, as is the case for most schools at this level, can't afford to pay for a professional crew. The ASUN reimburses schools $1000/game. The free model has needed to be adapted to include pay with the addition of baseball. Students in a class can't be required to crew events during spring break, like this weekend, or home ASUN conference series that are scheduled after graduation.

Our first year ended with a trip to the NCAA's and that cash infusion was used to install a 4-panel center hung scoreboard that looks ginormous in our 6-thousand seat arena. We also have a table ribbon board that thanks to poor arena lighting can blow out the cameras. I'm not sure how the Convo lighting is, but getting marketing to not use white backgrounds for sponsors and other graphics on the ribbon board helps greatly and those watching the stream can actually read the ad. You'd think being able to read the ad while viewing the event would be a higher priority for marketing to make sure they get right.

We have 4-cameras for ESPN3, and that's it. The board gets a feed of each camera, both replay channels and program through a black magic switcher. that the board operator controls. We use a Ross Carbonite switcher and XPression for graphics. Our setup works, but isn't idea. I think athletics attended a Magic or Lightning game and created a script to mirror that level of board production. My reply, was we can do that, but not at the same time we're streaming a game. Pick one. What's missing here is athletics marketing having at least 1 camera of it's own, preferable wireless to be dedicated to the board. I hope at the MAC level, you have more than 4 cameras and marketing will have at least one camera dedicated to the board.

The first prayer you need to be answered is OU choosing Daktronics. Nevco is what we have at UNF, it was much cheaper and our Ross equipment and Nevco don't always work as well together as Daktronics does. What vendor did OU use to upgrade the Peden board? Quirky is the word I use to describe Nevco/Ross connection. It really adds layers of training students in graphics. "There is no logical explanation why this is happening, but when it does you need to do this."

We have new Nevco scoreboards at baseball and softball. Thanks to hurricane Irma damaging the softball press box we aren't doing any softball games this year. We're doing the same set-up with a second black magic switcher in a portable rack. We're using fiber from our arena control room (I was anti-trailer and wanted a control room that would be climate controlled and better accessible to students for training and there is abundant fiber throughout campus, getting IT to cooperate and let it be used is a different challenge) out to the portable rack to produce the games. We get 4-camera's, crew communications, ... basically everything we'd get if we were doing an arena event. Then only issue, is to save $ there are converters and many additional connections at each camera position. More potential points of failure are never a positive. UNF is doing baseball this season because they are hosting the ASUN tournament at the end of May and eSPN3 is required. 10 or 11 games in four days with thunderstorms almost guaranteed!

When the new board is operational make sure you test your links (score, time, to's... anything you'd be pulling from the board) under game conditions and have the vendor there. I have plenty of trouble shooting with a Riss setup and using their Datalinq interface. Just because you are connected to the right file to get the info, doesn't mean it's going to work when the game starts.

Do you know if ESPN3 is going to move to ESPN+ and require a subscription? I hope not. MLS is the only specific content I've seen mentioned as being a part of the new service.

Do you attend the SVG College Summit in Atlanta and/or BEA/NAB? I find both organizations to be a great places to share and learn about our ESPN3 real world experience.

Good luck!

If you have any questions as the process moves forward and you get ready to actually do events let me know. I'm happy to help you avoid some of our issues.

At this point in the process, I strongly recommend you make data integration into whatever graphics platform you're using from the new board a part of the process and hold the scoreboard vendor to it. Particularly if a vendor not named Daktronics wins the bid.

Nevco answered yes to this question, but it was quite clear, after the fact, we were their beta test site three years ago and their software engineers had to write/rewrite the code.

We're able to get time, shot clock, score, TO's, and possession arrow to work with our Nevco board. StatCrew through Dashboard for hoops is pretty solid except for players wearing 0 and 00, those are hit and miss and I can't figure out why.

We aren't on the 7.0 version of Ross' XPression software (still on 6.7 XXXX) and datelinq. Brian at ESPN still creates /edits projects on 6.7 so he didn't think upgrading to 7.0 would fix anything for us.

FYI, If you do any baseball (Is it mud season in Athens yet?), you'll have to do some editing in the "away pitcher" group. I use the last series of lower thirds at the bottom of the group and the player name isn't linked to %jersey%. Instead, it's linked to row 1, so it just keeps using the name that's on the first line (row 1) of the relief pitcher section of the away baseball spreadsheet. All of the other data changes just not the players name. It wasn't corrected in Brian's latest project update so I had to "fix" it again. Changing the 1 to a %jersey% data link corrects it. I just copied what was working in the home pitcher group to correct this.

Enjoy spring, I'm sure it will get warmer up there eventually.

This thread needs to see light in the offices of the people making decisions.

I'd be interested to see contractually how ESPN could take MAC content and put it behind a separate pay wall. My hope is that we are "grandfathered" in, but since no one outside of the MAC offices have ever seen the ESPN contract, we don't know.