Columbus Clippers Baseball
The Customer
Columbus Clippers Baseball, US
www.milb.com/index.jsp?sid=t445
www.huntingtonparkcolumbus.com
On game day for the Columbus Clippers baseball team (the minor league Triple-A "farm" team for the Cleveland Indians), the ballpark buzzes to life with the smells of popcorn, fresh cut grass and hot dogs — the only things that make sense at a baseball game. This is Huntington Park, where the Clippers will play their 72 home games for their Columbus, Ohio fans.
The Challenge
Until 2015, Clippers games were produced in SD, using tape. With five different program platforms supported — an in-house feed, a scoreboard show, Internet, broadcast/cable television and a radio show simulcast — a better way to work the game had to be found. And that "better" had to include HD.
"In the tape-based SD world, we would literally have to walk a flash drive over to one person for social media and then to someone else to send game highlights to one of our broadcast partners. It was highly inefficient" said Mitchell. "We needed a system that would allow the staff to quickly adjust formats for immediate distribution and deliver the high-quality content our fans and the broadcast communities have come to expect."
The Grass Valley Solution
Producing live sports events for more than 20 years, Mitchell had an idea of what he wanted his new HD system to deliver. He also had a long history with Grass Valley, a Belden Brand, so that was the first place he looked. "I've been in broadcast a long time. I know Grass Valley gear and have seen how 'the big boys' use it in the Majors, so for me, it was the right partnership with all of the pieces in one place" according to Mitchell.
The system spec'd out for the Clippers would give them the quality they needed, the efficiency they longed for, with the reliability and flexibility that management demanded.