Located in Denver, Colorado, the Kroenke Sports Entertainment (KSE) network owns multiple sports franchises including:

- Denver Nuggets (NBA) 🏀
- Colorado Avalanche (NHL)🏒
- Colorado Rapids (MLS) and 🏐
- Colorado Mammoth (NLL) 🏆
- LA Rams (NFL) 🏉
- Arsenal FC Premier League soccer team ⚽️

It also owns several regional collegiate and high school sports events and in November 2017, set up Los Angeles Gladiators – an Overwatch esports team that will compete in the OWL. The production facility for the network – KSE Network Operations Center (KNOC) – creates and distributes content for Altitude Sports & Entertainment, a network of channels that broadcasts live and studio-based programming of the Colorado-based KSE-owned entities.

As well as delivering content to air for Altitude, KNOC creates and delivers media to the Broadcast Services Group at the Pepsi Center in downtown Denver, home of the Nuggets, Avalanche and Mammoth. Programming is used as in-venue entertainment for the franchises’ games as well as for multiple music and entertainment events.

 

The KSE Network Operations Center creates content for the Altitude sports and Entertainment network 

 

Challenges for KSE

As the need for more, higher-quality media has grown across the KSE organization, production teams at KNOC needed a way to more easily access and manage its huge range of media assets and archived footage. In any sports environment, speed is the most important factor so the crew need to be able to log content as it’s ingested, attach metadata so it can be easily found later, and store the content in a way that can be accessed again extremely quickly. Once ingested and stored correctly, multiple editors need to work on content, without delay.

“We needed to be able to deploy a media asset management and storage infrastructure that enhanced and integrated smoothly into the workflows at all of our production houses. At the end of the day, if you can’t find the content, you don’t own it.”

David Zur, SVP of Operations and Engineering at KSE Media ventures
 

Solution

IPV worked closely with KSE to configure the Curator MAM system to manage the sports network’s assets at KNOC. Seamlessly integrated into its existing workflows, Curator was installed by long-time IPV partner, StorExcel. Curator is used to manage media throughout the centre’s post-production processes and plays a key part in the continued tactical development of the network’s media properties.

Using Curator makes sure that all of KSE’s assets are consistently ingested, correctly stored and tagged with metadata. Curator also gives KSE the flexibility to work with proxies, avoiding having to move and edit with large, cumbersome high resolution files. Once complete, the high-resolution files are brought back online for export and delivery. This use of low resolution proxies speeds up the overall production processes for the network.

The new workflow at the facility is layered on a storage workflow comprised of multiple Quantum storage applications, including Xcellis workflow storage, the StorNext data management platform and QXS disk RAID storage. Initially, a small group of 15 users operated Curator to manage assets for the edit of long-form and promotional content and the next phase will see the infrastructure rolled out availability to users across all the businesses in the KSE family.

 

KNOC delivers media to the Pepsi Center, home of the Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche

 

Benefits to KSE

  • Uniform approach – Curator gives the KNOC facility a level of consistency in its content management, creating more efficient post-production processes
  • Proxy-based workflows – As the pioneer of proxies, Curator allows KSE to easily manage large files while reducing expensive storage resources to just 2% of their HD source files
  • Phased roll-out – KSE is able to operate its Curator system in line with current needs and easily expand as required
  • Third-party integration – Installed by StorExcel, IPV’s Curator system is tightly integrated with KSE’s storage infrastructure from Quantum
 

KSE, StorExcel and IPV shake on the deal at 2017 NAB Show

Conclusion 

The deployment of KSE’s new media management and storage infrastructure is part of a larger digital content initiative aimed at centralizing the production and delivery of content across KSE’s media outlets. The company was very selective with the components it chose for the first phase of technical deployment so it could operate efficiently today but easily grow in the coming years.

“The beauty of this project is that we got to start fresh. The opportunity to do this doesn’t come often but we had a few legacy systems to work around.This is a project where we’ve worked closely with IPV and KSE to make sure we can deliver the speed and easy to use content management that is expected in today’s sports organizations.”

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