Happy Thanksgiving to all of our customers and friends, and special thanks to everyone on our team who is on the road over this holiday weekend. The live TV business can be tough during the holidays. Most people are home watching football, but somebody needs to get all of that great live content to the TV screens. That’s where we come in!
As you might expect, we have some great football games on our schedule this weekend.
Let’s start with the 4K game of the week on FS1, our last of the season. 4K guru, Rick Varney, hasn’t missed a single minute of Fox’s 4K action this season, and his work has been flawless. Special thanks to Rick for being PSSI’s go-to guy when it comes to 4K, all season long! Joe Cox will be joining Rick at Bill Snyder Family Stadium in Manhattan, KS for Saturday night’s game between Kansas State and the Iowa State Cyclones. Two C-band trucks, two great engineers, one great game in beautiful 4K!
Lots of action in America’s heartland. Let’s head to Little Rock, where Kevin Spangler is working close to home (for once) on one of two SEC on CBS games of the week. Kevin is at War Memorial Stadium for the game between the Arkansas Razorbacks and Missouri Tigers on Friday afternoon. From there, new-to-PSSI driver Daniel Savoy will hustle the truck to Larry Sheets in Oklahoma for Fox’s broadcast of the Oklahoma versus Oklahoma State rivalry game at T. Boone Pickens Stadium in Stillwater, OK Saturday night.
John May has managed to stay relatively close to his home state of Texas for most of the football season, and he will wrap up the regular season at Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin for another big time rivalry game. Friday afternoon we’ve got the Texas Tech Red Raiders in town to take on the Texas Longhorns, and John will be there in his pristine CK48 mobile teleport for our friends at Fox.
- Speaking of rivalries, how about Ohio State versus Michigan? This is going to be a big time game on Fox, so we have senior engineer Craig Henry heading to Ann Arbor on Thanksgiving Day to get all set up for a couple days of transmissions from the Big House.
Staying in the Big 10, Steve Hagerty is back in C43 at another Memorial Stadium – this one in Champaign, IL – for the in-state matchup between Illinois and Northwestern on Saturday. This is another “home run” production for our friends at Fox, so Steve will be there a day prior for testing before the big game on Saturday. The truck will stay nearby for the Big 10 Championship at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis next weekend, also with Steve!
Back to the SEC, Rick Ball will make his way back to the mainland from Hawaii to be in place for the big game on Saturday in Auburn, where the Tigers will host the Alabama Crimson Tide on CBS Saturday afternoon. There may be no bigger rivalry in college football than the one that exists between these two schools, and Rick, an Alabama native, wouldn’t miss this game for the world.
Another in-state rivalry game in Virginia, as Mike Howley takes the CK25 mobile teleport to Scott Stadium at the University of Virginia, where the Cavaliers host the Virginia Tech Hokies on Friday, live on ABC. The CK25 got a couple of weeks worth of TLC at our shop in Orlando, so she’s ready for a busy winter of some of our biggest events, including some UFC and ESPN events in DC and NYC before the end of the year.
Dave “Mitch” Mitchell will be spending the weekend in wild, wonderful West Virginia. On Saturday he’s back at Joan C. Edwards Stadium in Huntington, WV, where the Thundering Herd of Marshall will host Florida International. From there he heads across the state to Morgantown, back to the WVU coliseum for more Mountaineer hoops.
A lot of our team will be dealing with weather, and you’d better believe Colorado-based Mike Sheehan has his chains ready. He’ll be heading up to Ft. Collins on Thursday after turkey to be in place for Friday’s matchup between Colorado State and Boise State, live on the CBS Sports Network. After that he’ll have a few down days before things get really snowy as he covers skiing in Beaver Creek with our friends at Concom next weekend.
More rivalry games out west. Up in Seattle, local engineer David Meyer is excited to be working the 112th Apple Cup, as the Washington Huskies host the Washington State Cougars in a Friday night game on the Fox networks.
Down in Pasadena, Chris Hovden is our guy at the Rose Bowl, where the UCLA Bruins host the Cal Bears in a late game on Saturday night. We’re getting quite a bit of weather in Southern California, so Chris and the fans might get a little wet!
Classic rivalry game in Northern California, where Notre Dame is traveling in to take on the Stanford Cardinal on Saturday afternoon. California native Wes Hill is on his way up north to see some family before the big game, also on Fox.
Brian Blomstrom is pretty close to Wes at San Jose State’s CEFCU Stadium. There the Spartans will host Fresno State on Saturday on ESPN, and there Brian will have a big transmission out of the CK35 mobile teleport. Brian’s multiplexing 10 cameras for delivery back to ESPN headquarters in Connecticut, where the production team there will finish the show for broadcast. Special thanks to Devon Porter for getting the CK35 up to San Jose for Brian to meet there on Friday night.
And we’ve got some more NFL football, as well. Kyle Meyer and Dennis Smith are working together again on the NFL Network’s tailgate show, live from the M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore. The red hot Ravens will host the San Francisco 49ers, and Dennis and Kyle will have their hands full providing production and transmission services for the tailgate show in the parking lot.
Let’s squeeze a little hockey into the mix, while we’re at it. Rick Kolinek has more AHL action with our friends at Program Productions on Friday. He’s back in Rockford for more Ice Hogs hockey, live from the BMO Harris Bank Centre.
It’s college basketball preseason tournament time, and we are well represented at far-flung locations through the week. Steve Chaisson and Rick Ball are wrapping up the Maui Invitational at the Lahaina Civic Center with our friends at ESPN. Both guys will get our truck and trailer to the port on Thanksgiving before flying back to the mainland.
Justin Roszak is enjoying himself at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas, where he’s putting in long days for ESPN’s coverage of the Battle 4 Atlantis tournament. Justin wraps up on Friday, at which point our island partners will move the truck to the Albany Resort, where Blake Blomstrom takes up residence for a week’s worth of golf. It’s the Hero World Challenge on Golf Channel and NBC, and Blake is our man with a big mux and some comms support for the production teams there through next Sunday.
Back in California, John Jennings is spending his Thanksgiving in Anaheim, where he will be working with ESPN for multiple days of transmissions for the Wooden Legacy tournament through Sunday.
With football’s regular season winding down, we are excited for winter full of exciting college basketball, from the preseason tourneys all the way through March Madness. Here we go again!
Some good fighting on our schedules, as usual. Zane Michaels and Joe Kelderhouse will be spending Thanksgiving with their WWE family. Zane’s working the weekly NXT show at Full Sail University in Orlando on Wednesday, and from there he’ll make the trip up to Birmingham for Friday night’s SmackDown show on Fox. Then Joe and Zane bring the CK30 mobile teleport over to Duluth, GA for WWE Starrcade 2019, live from the Infinite Energy Center on Sunday. Monday Night RAW is in Nashville, and Zane and Joe will make that trip, as well, as you might have expected. Nice run, fellas!
More Top Rank on ESPN action, as the tour is back in Vegas for a big matchup between Oscar Valdez and Andres “Jaguarcito” Gutierrez, live from the Cosmopolitan on Saturday night. Carl Frampton and Tyler McCreary square off in the co-main event, and we will also have a host of undercards leading up to these two big fights. Paul Blomstrom is there for ESPN, providing a multiplexed transmission, including a 1080p pathway, for domestic and international distribution. Strategic Television project manager, Michael Hollander, won’t be there in person, but he will be monitoring a closed-circuit feed from the PSSI International Teleport, as our team there will handle the international distribution of the fight.
Next up for boxing: another ESPN bout in Mexico! Our team is preparing the gear, logistics, and vendor relationships for next weekend in Puebla, Mexico. Not much of a break for anybody over Thanksgiving, but that’s how we like it at PSSI Global Services, where we are live all the time! Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!