Harvard Athletics Transforms Collegiate Sports Storytelling with AJA Gear

Between the maturation of IP and remote production workflows, collegiate sports production is advancing rapidly. For an Ivy League institution like Harvard, keeping pace requires an agile production pipeline and dependable gear. Its athletics department delivers over 325 live NCAA Division 1 sports productions and 500 edited videos a year. To ensure reliable video capture, streaming, recording, and signal conversion, Harvard Sr. Associate Director of Athletics for Content and Strategic Communications Imry Halevi banks on AJA gear.

He not only leverages it to broadcast and stream games to fans, but also to create media that spotlights the personalities behind them, like the sailing team skipper working on vaccine lab research. According to Halevi, there are so many interesting stories that make Harvard and its athletes special, and it's his department's job to make them discoverable to recruits, students, professors, coaches, and parents.

"Creating compelling stories for audiences to watch across platforms while also preserving Harvard Athletics' rich history is our mission, which means we're never standing still. We are constantly gathering input from our core audience and innovating," he noted. "When it comes to our workflow, people depend on us to do our job well, and we depend on equipment to get the job done, so the flexibility and reliability our AJA gear provide are paramount."

Modernizing production infrastructure
Harvard Athletics' production pipeline has evolved significantly since Halevi joined the university 14 years ago. Back then, the crew traveled to each venue to produce the games, and scoreboard content was more limited. Today, Halevi and crew produce most of the broadcasts, streams, and scoreboard media remotely for distribution to more channels using two centralized on-campus control rooms that power a distributed NDI workflow.

"We now remotely produce everything from two master control rooms and are streaming to more platforms than ever. We're creating long-form content for YouTube and ESPN+, and short-form videos for Instagram, Facebook and TikTok," explained Halevi. "Our team is experimenting a lot with 9:16 and reshaping our scoreboard media based on fan input."

With its remote infrastructure in place, the crew can easily produce four shows simultaneously. Halevi can manage a basketball game for ESPN and an in-arena video board show, while also facilitating soccer and field hockey productions. If his crew needs to produce more than four events, he can tap portable fly packs. For off-campus events, like rowing in New Jersey, skiing in Vermont, and sailing on the Charles River, Halevi sends the main feeds to the campus control rooms for production, with camera operators often the only ones to travel.

Under the hood
The NDI pipeline Halevi built enables the team to deliver high-quality 720p 59.94 streams and leverage their existing network without having to add more capacity. But even with NDI devices at the edge, SDI and fiber remain part of the workflow. To get NDI signals to SDI monitors and convert fiber to SDI, the crew uses AJA BRIDGE NDI 3G and FiDO Mini-Converters.

"If I'm producing a game and I have an SDI source I need to distribute via NDI, I just send it to the BRIDGE NDI 3G. The fact that I can preview everything in the UI with 16 windows has been helpful for our workflow," he explained. "We also have a ton of AJA FiDO fiber converters in a rack, which are convenient for converting fiber to SDI on copper for use on our switchers."

AJA U-TAP also supports remote production needs, enabling commentators to work from home on Zoom, which is useful for sports like rowing, where races start early in the morning. Halevi's team just sets them up with Zoom on a computer and a U-TAP, so they can see and hear the production and know what they're calling. The device also supports social streaming needs, allowing them to get their produced live game stream to TikTok Studio software on Windows.

Twenty-six AJA HELO Plus devices power H.264 streaming and recording. Running all the time, they deliver one game feed to Harvard Athletics' international streaming site and another to its real-time clipping and tagging solution for the creation of social media highlight clips.

"Our HELOs run constantly without issue, and the audio meters in the interface and on the physical device are huge. Plus, we can easily monitor, start, and pause recording and streaming remotely from the UI, which is helpful for remote production," he explained. "We also love the layout feature, which lets us view a recording of different in-venue video displays at the same time, so we can see an SDI stream on the center hung and an HDMI stream of the ribbon board, then use the feature to make them look nice and work well with each other. The HELO Plus essentially becomes a small but powerful switcher; it's been a lifesaver."

The next chapter
Innovation remains a continued focus for Halevi, as he strives to make the department's storytelling even more engaging for audiences while using his resources more wisely. "We're continuously looking at how we can uplevel our content to shine the light on what makes Harvard so special, and leveraging reliable tools from manufacturers like AJA frees up more of our time to do that by reducing troubleshooting and headaches," he concluded.

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