Happy New Year from PSSI Global Services! 2017 was a banner year for us, and we’re expecting 2018 to be even bigger and better. From all of us here, a warm thank you to our customers, colleagues, friends and family for your support.
Bowls abound! We already have some 15 bowl games under our belts, and plenty more to come.
Dave Brin just wrapped a successful transmission at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, where the Purdue Boilermakers squeaked out a victory over the Arizona Wildcats at the 2017 Foster Farms Bowl. Dave’s bringing the C47 truck down to LA so it’s in position for some New Year’s festivities, as we will be busy in Southern California.
Mark Huss will spend his New Year’s Eve at Disneyland, where he will be providing a multiplexed transmission for Univision’s live countdown to 2018 from the happiest place on earth.
John Jennings is heading to the Elk’s Lodge in Pasadena to provide transmission services for the Funny or Die Rose Parade live stream, with hosts Will Ferrell and Molly Shannon narrating the parade for comedy fans.
For more conventional Rose Parade coverage, Larry Sheets will have a C-band truck at KTLA studios in Hollywood to provide a secondary transmission path for the worldwide broadcast of the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day. It’s a busy week for Larry, who was down in San Diego earlier this week for the 2017 Holiday Bowl, where Washington State faced Michigan State at SDCCU Stadium.
A few hundred miles east of Larry, we have Mike Sheehan setting up C12 in El Paso, Texas, for the Sun Bowl on CBS. Here it’s Arizona State versus NC State. We don’t find ourselves in El Paso very often, but you can count on us at the Sun Bowl at the end of every year with our friends at CBS.
It’s a busy week in Texas for us. Ron Ford is already handling some Cotton Bowl press conference feeds at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. This is Ron’s last scheduled job for 2017, and it just so happens that his first scheduled job in 2017 was at the very same place! We love it when our customers come back to us year in and year out to provide rock solid transmission services.
John May and CK48 are also setting up at AT&T Stadium for ESPN’s broadcast of the big game. John’s had some well-deserved time off, but he is glad to be back in his truck and on the clock. It’s USC versus Ohio State on Friday night, and John will provide a multiplexed transmission for ESPN’s prime-time broadcast.
Believe it or not, we have a third truck on-site at AT&T Stadium for the game. John Poss is coming up from Houston to help the Big Ten Network with some pre- and post-game interviews and tape feeds. We love it when we get an opportunity to circle the wagons with multiple trucks, especially in Texas!
Nick Ray is back at it in Annapolis, Maryland, for Thursday’s Military Bowl at Navy-Marine Corps Stadium. It’s a 10-channel multiplexed transmission for ESPN’s broadcast of the game between Virginia and Navy, which will be produced back at ESPN headquarters in Connecticut.
Steve Chaisson is back in C36 down in Phoenix for ESPN’s broadcast of the Fiesta Bowl, live from the University of Phoenix Stadium on Saturday. It’s Penn State versus Washington, and Steve will be providing a three-channel mux transmission for our friends at ESPN.
PSSI Global Services is extremely proud to be the exclusive transmission provider for ESPN’s extensive coverage of the 2017-18 College Football Playoff. We have already been preparing for weeks for the three biggest games in college football.
Here in Southern California, Chris Hovden and Wes Hill are setting up our flagship truck, the CK35, for almost a full week of live transmissions from the Rose Bowl. We will be multiplexing up to 14 channels via fiber and satellite all the way through the big game on New Year’s Day. Tomorrow John Bright, Joe Cox and Nathan Holsey will park and set up our K34 production/uplink truck alongside the CK35. The last SEC Nation show of the season will be produced in our truck and distributed to crazed fans around the nation.
Meanwhile, Justin Roszak and Rick Ball are already in New Orleans getting themselves set for all of ESPN’s transmissions needs from the Sugar Bowl at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. Here, again we will be providing extensive multiplexed feeds via both fiber and satellite. The newly rebuilt C31 was designed for just this type of complex transmission setup, and Justin and Rick are the best in the business when it comes to managing more feeds than you can count on two hands.
Rick Varney and Steve Toth spent much of last week at our Satcom facility in Orlando assembling an enormous fiber encoding kit for the National Championship in Atlanta. Rick’s back in Orlando this week to put the finishing touches on our kit and our trucks to ensure we are prepared for what will be an unprecedented number of inbound and outbound feeds. We will have the kit, the dual-antenna C27, the C41 and the C31 positioned throughout the city for ESPN’s extensive programming leading up to the big game on Jan. 8.
It is high time to give some long-overdue recognition and praise to Shrewsbury-based project manager Gavin Williams, who has been pulling together all of the paperwork for ESPN’s bowl package. Gavin has had his hands full throughout the holiday season making sure all of our engineers in the field have the correct job information, from transmission specs to hotel arrangements. Great job, Gavin!
It’s not all football, of course. We have some more Chicago Wolves hockey up in the frozen tundra of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Rick Kolinek heads to UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena for Friday night’s game, and you’d better believe he will be bundled up!
Mike Howley’s also braving the elements this weekend up in Portland, Maine, where we’re back at the Portland Expo building for more NBA G League hoops on New Year’s Eve. Earlier in the week, Mike’s at the TD Garden in Boston for Turner’s coverage of the Celtics versus the Rockets.
Steve Toth finds himself back in front of one of our fiber encoding kits in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on Saturday, as the Tar Heels host the Wake Forest Demon Deacons. UNC fans are surely looking for a better outcome than what happened last week against Wofford. Steve will be up early on Saturday morning to set up the seven-channel “at-home” transmission via fiber at the Dean Smith Center.
It’s been a busy week for Shelby Schmidt at the PIT Studio in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with quite a few live inserts for CNN, Fox and CNBC throughout the week and into the weekend. The guys up the road at the PSSI International Teleport (PIT) are also plenty busy as they prepare for freezing temperatures and snow.
Back in warmer climes, we are getting prepped for UFC 219: Cyborg vs. Holm, a big-time pay-per-view (PPV) on Saturday night, live from the T-Mobile Arena. Engineer in charge (EIC) Tracy Michaels and senior engineer Jim Flowers will park at the compound Thursday afternoon along with project managers Garrett Hunt and Keith Valeri. Engineers Ray Loyko, Kevin Spangler and Paul Blomstrom will be setting up four trucks, as this ace crew will provide total transmission services for the domestic and international broadcasts of the weigh-in, prelims, main event and post-fight pressers to UFC fans worldwide. Paul will be at the helm of the exclusive 4K/UHD broadcast for PPV takers. It’s going to be a great night of fighting in Vegas!
It’s been a busy and exciting year, and we can’t wait to see what 2018 will bring.