The first weekend after college football’s regular always feels a little strange. Every single weekend since August has been absolutely chock full of college football all over the country, and our engineers have become well-accustomed to spending Saturdays at the stadium. It was a great regular season – our busiest ever, and flawless to boot – but now our sights are set on the conference championships and bowl games coming up.
Let’s start with the 2019 Big 10 Championship, where Steve Hagerty is already all set up for Fox’s wall-to-wall coverage of the game between The Ohio State Buckeyes and Wisconsin Badgers. It’s quite a scene at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, and Steve will make sure the whole country gets to see and feel that excitement. We covered a lot of Big 10 games this year, and we’re pleased to be there for the final showdown.
Rick Ball made it to all but one SEC on CBS game of the week this year, same as he’s been doing since he started at PSSI. He’s very much a part of the CBS family, and there is absolutely no way he would miss the SEC Championship game at Mercedes Benz Stadium in Atlanta on Saturday. The Georgia Bulldogs will face the LSU Tigers, and you’d better believe it’s going to be a big game. Rick’s also doing a big transmission for CBS, transmitting massive amounts of data via satellite to accommodate multiple at-home productions of pre-game, halftime, and post-game shows along with the game itself. Millions will tune into this game, and that’s just the way we like it!
It’s such a big game that multiple news outlets will be there to cover all the hoopla, and PSSI News Group’s Lorenzo Dottori will be among the news trucks for CNN’s live shots from the stadium.
We will also be at the Mountain West Championship, where Boise State will host Hawaii on Saturday night, live from Albertson’s Stadium. We’ll have another big at-home transmission there, as well, as Steve Chaisson will transmit 10 multiplexed cameras back to ESPN headquarters in Connecticut, where the production team will cut and add graphics for broadcast. We’ll have a few more of these at-home bowl games for ESPN in the weeks to come, so stay tuned!
And what about Conference USA? CBS Sports Network has had us all over the conference this season for their game broadcasts. Mike Howley will cap off another great season down in Boca Raton, FL on Saturday, as Florida Atlantic hosts the University of Alabama – Birmingham.
Let’s not forget about high school football! David Meyer will be at Sparks Stadium in Puyallup, WA on Saturday for the WIAA Football Championship. Big thanks to our friends at Rush Media for including us on an exciting season of high school football in Washington.
And, believe it or not, that’s it for football this weekend! We are looking forward to the bowl season, as well as some more NFL action that will include a pretty big game in Miami…
A long and successful golf season is drawing to a close, as well, but for golf the offseason only lasts a few days. Blake Blomstrom has been enjoying a little sunshine down at Albany Resort in New Providence, Bahamas. Blake’s working long days for Golf Channel, providing a multiplexed transmission and extensive comms services for the news crew there. It’s the Hero World Challenge, which will wrap up Saturday on NBC and Golf Channel so long as the weather holds.
Back on the mainland, Golf Channel mainstay Chris Golden is working close to home at the Ritz Carlton Grande Lakes Golf Club in Orlando. There we have a few days of coverage at the PNC Father/Son Classic, a great event that we’re pleased to do every year. We’ll have one more tournament next week in Naples, FL, then a week or two off before our team heads to Hawaii to start it all over again. We are so pleased and grateful to continue our relationship with Golf Channel for another year as the exclusive satellite transmission provider for their entire schedule. Onward!
Speaking of valued customers, the WWE train keeps on rolling. We manage every single WWE show with impeccable attention to detail and dedication, but this Friday’s SmackDown is an extra special event. In association with SmackDown, WWE will tape their annual “Tribute to the Troops,” a co-production with Armed Forces Entertainment, that honors and entertains United States Armed Forces members every year. This year the show is at the Crown Coliseum in Fayetteville, NC, and Nick Ray is at the helm of the CK30 mobile teleport. Driver Joe Kelderhouse meticulously waxed the tractor-trailer so that PSSI Global Services would look their very best at this memorable event. After the guys are done in NC, Joe will pilot the CK30 to Greenville, SC to resume the regular Monday Night RAW schedule with Zane Michaels handling WWE’s transmissions. Good stuff!
We’re working with our friends at Concom again this weekend, as the UFC Tour makes a stop in our nation’s capital. We’ve got quite the all-star team setting up at the Capital One Arena in Washington, DC. It’s another UFC on ESPN, which will feature Alistair Overeem taking on Jairzinho Rozenstruik in the main event. Tracy Michaels will be tech managing the entire event, a relatively new service offering in our toolkit that Tracy has been handling with aplomb. Strategic Television’s VP, Jason Land, is there to manage the domestic and international distribution of all the feeds (with PSSI International Teleport in the middle of it all, of course). UFC vet Jim Flowers is joined by senior engineer, Craig Henry, in the CK25 mobile teleport, while seasoned engineer Dave Buckman has another truck there for another Ku-band pathway, as well. A great team effort for another exciting UFC event.
Abisai Falcon, one member of our intrepid team in Orlando, will be providing transmission management services for our friends at Telemundo this weekend in Atlanta. It’s the Miss Universe pageant, live from the Tyler Perry Studios, and Abi – one of our experienced, bi-lingual engineers – is there to ensure the transmission goes well for all parties.
We’re happy to be back at Pro-Caps Laboratories in Henderson, NV, for more live Pro-Caps Labs on HSN through Sunday. Joe Cox is there for all the live sales of these great products.
Also in the always-exciting “other” category on our schedule: Animal Planet’s “Give a Dog a Home: Live!” Chris Hovden and Wes Hill have the CK35 mobile teleport down at Discovery Studios in Playa Vista for redundant transmission pathways of what is sure to be a heartwarming and hilarious live event featuring rescue pets up for adoption. Animal Planet is partnering with Best Friends Animal Society and Wallis Annenberg PetSpace to connect their pet adoption centers with millions of viewers around the country. What a great event!
It’s a relatively quiet weekend for college basketball, but with football getting out of the way we will have a lot of hoops in our future. ESPN has a couple of fun basketball games for us this weekend, including the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame’s Hoophall West Classic tournament in Scottsdale, AZ. John Jennings is spending a few days at Chaparral High School for ESPN’s broadcast of multiple high school games.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Mike Lemieux is at the University of Rhode Island’s Ryan Center for the game between the Rams and the Providence Friars. Mike’s handling the transmission for ESPN’s at-home production of the game, sending the cameras back to Bristol for the final production and broadcast.
We’re excited to be back in Portland, OR for the Nike Cross Nationals, an annual cross country running competition at the Glendoveer Golf Course. Dave Brin’s up there for the uplink, and our team at the PSSI International Teleport will encode his feed for live streaming on runnerspace.com on Saturday. Check it out!
How about some skiing? Mike Sheehan knows a thing or two about working in the snow. The Colorado resident made his way up a mountain near Beaver Creek for another year of working with our partners at Concom on the Beaver Creek Alpine Ski World Cup, live from Birds of Prey.
Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve probably been seen some politics on the news. We’re there for pretty much all of it, good or bad. PSSI News Group’s Steve Mills and Bill O’Toole have been in Iowa for CNN’s coverage of the ongoing Democratic campaign, and odds are they will be back quite a bit between now and the Iowa Caucus. Ron Ford will make his way to Houston this weekend for a live shot at a prominent politician’s home on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday morning. And the PSSI Pittsburgh Videotech Center is cranking out studio live shots across all the major news networks, day in and day out.
We’ll finish up with some boxing, and there’s quite a bit of it this weekend. We’re not in Saudi Arabia for DAZN’s Joshua vs. Ruiz II this time around, but we are in El Centro, CA to contribute some live material to the broadcast. Larry Sheets will be parked outside a private home with live images of a big viewing party on Saturday afternoon. Larry’s in El Centro following another successful edition of Golden Boy Promotions Thursday Night Boxing. This one was at the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa. Strategic Television project manager, Michael Hollander, monitored the feed remotely, while the PSSI International Teleport handled multiple turnarounds to international boxing fans.
Michael will also remotely manage the world feed for the upcoming PBC on Showtime fight, live from the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Dennis Smith is there to encode the fiber on Showtime’s primary path, and he’ll also keep an eye on the AT&T Global Video Services fiber pathway to PSSI International Teleport, where the team there will distribute the fight to fans around the world. Strategic Television project manager Victor Verno’s on hand, as well, to make sure everything goes well on this fight, which will culminate in a matchup between Jermall Charlo and Dennis Hogan, live on Showtime and around the world.
Last, but not least, we are back in Mexico for more Top Rank boxing on ESPN+. Project manager, Roxana Sanchez, has been working with local vendors for weeks to prepare for the big fight on Saturday between Jerwin Ancajas and Miguel Gonzalez, live from Puebla, Mexico. Our Las Vegas team quickly assembled some transmission gear for shipment to Puebla last week, and Jose Sanchez towed our 5.5m antenna to Puebla from its home in Guadalajara (with Roxana supervising, of course). Kevin Spangler is also in town to join the fun, and our team will provide ESPN with a multiplexed transmission for domestic and international distribution. Nice work down there, guys!