Fox Sports And EVS Announce Major Deal At NAB Show

Fox Sports today announced the acquisition of the MediaInfra Strada Routing and Control solution by EVS, a provider of live video technology.

The solution will be used by the Fox Sports production team in order to perform critical routing and control operations at various large-scale live events. The MediaInfra Strada solution will be delivered to Qatar in October 2022 ahead the FIFA Men’s World Cup that will take place in November 2022. It will then make its way to the U.S. for the live production of the 2023 Super Bowl in Arizona next February, and will also be later deployed around the globe for other prestigious competitions such as the Woman’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand and the 17th edition of the UEFA Euro in Germany.

Commenting on the deal, Kevin Callahan, EVS VP field operations & engineering, said: “This was a straightforward decision for us since the MediaInfra Strada solution meets all our needs in terms of our orchestration, signal processing and manipulation requirements for events of such scale. EVS presented us with everything we were looking for.”

Launched in June 2021, EVS’ MediaInfra Strada solution is designed to solve all routing challenges in any production environment. Built on an IP backbone and leveraging EVS’ field-proven Cerebrum and Neuron product lines, the routing and control solution enables a seamless transition to full IP infrastructures, while continuing to offer SDI support. From a user perspective, the difference between handling SDI sources or IP streams goes unnoticed since all the underlying complexities are completely abstracted by the solution’s user-friendly graphical interfaces.

The MediaInfra Strada installation delivered by EVS is entirely tailored to the requirements of Fox Sports. To ensure the efficient and reliable real-time processing and compression of all video/audio streams, Fox Sports has also chosen to deploy EVS’ Neuron Compress and Convert modules.

“We were impressed with the flexibility demonstrated by MediaInfra Strada. Our team is looking forward to working with a solution that can easily be reconfigured ahead of each event to properly address all our different workflow scenarios that await us,” Callahan said. “The over-arching control system, Cerebrum, also makes it an incredibly powerful and dynamic solution that we can customize in a way that works best for us.”

Peter Schut, EVS  SVP media infrastructure, said: “Today’s announcement is a key milestone in the growth of EVS’ Media Infrastructure offering. It further strengthens our position in the US market and is a testimony to the dedication put in by our team to guarantee robust and reliable workflows that can be tailored to any production environment.”

EVS’ MediaInfra Strada is being exhibited at the NAB Show (through April 27 in Las Vegas) in the North Hall, at Booth 2625.