With its fleet of 54 OB trucks, Game Creek Video was a natural choice to provide remote facilities for the 2018 Thursday Night Football telecasts, which recently wrapped at the end of December. Game Creek designated its three-trailer Encore mobile unit for all the broadcasts, serving over 200 credentialed network personnel each week. Like all the company’s remote production systems, Encore relies on RTS intercoms to provide smooth, reliable connectivity.
   

Equipped with a full high-definition video production facility, Encore is essentially a network on wheels. The A truck houses an RTS ADAM digital matrix frame, connected in ring mode to ADAM-M frames housed in the B and C trailers via TBX-Tribus fiber links. With most technicians involved requiring multiple lines of communication, this deployment provides over 700 ports for intercom traffic, connecting the RTS KP32 and KP12 keypanels located at the many workstations throughout the trailers and in the stadium broadcast booth.

For its first year of Thursday Night Football telecasts, the network decided to upgrade significantly from the equipment package it uses for its other regular-season games. Thursday games use playoff levels of equipment – including extra cameras and advanced graphics and audio capabilities – to deliver the high production values it felt would attract and hold a large prime-time audience. Game Creek engineers Brian Ristine, Matt Caron and Lucas Males operate the three-trailer Encore system.

The Game Creek team particularly appreciates the RTS intercom platform’s ability to meld IP networking with legacy analog equipment. Each RTS frame houses AIO cards to drive the keypanels and an RVON-16 card to interface VoIP to analog I/O sources. MADI cards in the A and B trailers provide connectivity to the broadcast booth and Game Creek’s Pride mobile unit, also on site providing support. An OMNEO card In the Encore C-trailer’s ADAM-M frame provides AoIP integration with outside sources via Dante or OMNEO digital networking.

“RTS ADAM is a proven, extremely reliable system that allows us to scale up to whatever is necessary, from a five-camera basketball game to a major production like Thursday Night Football,” notes Paul Bonar, VP of Engineering Solutions for Game Creek Video. “That’s why we have installed RTS intercoms in every OB truck we’ve equipped since the company began, 25 years ago.”