The Sun Belt Conference, a collegiate athletic conference featuring 14 member institutions across 10 states, had a mission to provide live coverage of their championship events for 18 different sponsored sports.
Producing neutral site collegiate championship events for the Sun Belt Conference was always a costly and difficult project to take on. With the desire to cover more championships in new places and venues that weren’t accessible, while also looking to reduce production costs (typically associated with onsite trucks and third party production crews), the Sun Belt team made the decision to redesign their office space within the Superdome in New Orleans and created a studio and control room to centralize their productions, making it more viable to produce 100+ live sporting events each year.
Sun Belt built out their production facility with a Remote Production workflow. LiveU was a must as the conference was well-versed in the technology and its abilities to deliver high-quality video in bandwidth-challenged indoor and outdoor venues – most often outdoor for cross country and golf. Centralizing productions eliminated the need to find locations to produce content or hire third party production companies for neutral site championships. With a higher production quality and the ability to cover more ground for less, Sun Belt is certainly seeing the ROI in their tech investment.
Without LiveU, the Sun Belt would not be able to provide full coverage of both their Golf Championship in Georgia and their Tennis Championships in Florida, happening at the same time, all from their control room in New Orleans. This allows them to have full control of their brand and consistency across all their broadcasts, leveraging the same production team and talent in-house.
This allows the Sun Belt to utilize the same production talent, control their brand and return more to the member institutions than utilizing 3rd party production companies. Many of their broadcasts appear on the ESPN platform and the national exposure has helped the conference increase sponsorship opportunities including a large partnership with a local financial institution.
“It’s a significant reduction cost in terms of managing it all ourselves centrally, having the flexibility of LiveU. Without the portability and flexibility of LiveU, we wouldn’t be able to do golf or cross country championship coverage.”
Keith Gill, Commissioner of Sun Belt Conference
