NFL's Philadelphia Eagles Deploys Black Box Systems

Black Box® has announced that the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles are using the company's Emerald® SE and PE KVM-over-IP systems across the sports team's facilities and production sites to support game-day production.

The Emerald KVM solution gives the team's production staff the ability to work anywhere via an Ethernet connection, accessing both virtual machines and remote desktops without experiencing delays or any degradation of video quality.

"Of the products out there, Emerald checked all the boxes," said David Sullivan, senior broadcast and media engineer, Philadelphia Eagles. "Because it is standards-based networking and it's over a one gig infrastructure, I can take a KVM receiver and go to any port in the building, drop it down, and have full access to all of our production systems. Production folks, graphics designers, and editors have no idea that there's any device between them and the host machine. The video performance is exceptional, especially considering the bandwidth that it averages. And in addition to all of those things, the price is attractive."

Sullivan and the Eagles successfully installed the Black Box Emerald KVM-over-IP system to move toward more flexible signal distribution and extension across multiple sites with full support for virtual machine access, without compromising the performance essential to a seamless user experience. The Eagles so far have established approximately 100 Emerald endpoints, spread across two TV studios and one control room in the team's practice facility at the NovaCare Complex and also at Lincoln Financial Field to accommodate the scoreboard control room and all of the associated devices there.

The Emerald KVM network supports every graphics processor for the scoreboard and for the television studios, which feed social media, local television partners, and daily press conferences. The KVM system also supports user desktops — including Sullivan's — across the production team. Staff need only a mouse, keyboard, monitor, and Ethernet connection to log in and get to work. As Sullivan put it, "It's our connection to everything."

As it turned out, the shift onto the Emerald KVM platform also gave Sullivan and his team much-needed agility as COVID brought about new protocols for distancing and remote work. As long as there is an Ethernet connection, Sullivan can put a producer or engineer anywhere. Taking advantage of the Emerald network's resilience over WANs, Sullivan sometimes brings an Emerald receiver on the road with him so that he can dial back into any of the team's production servers while he's at an away game.

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