The Mountain West Conference recently hosted its men’s and women’s Tennis Championships, and PlaySight provided the automated production live streaming technology at both host venues.
Brian Tripp, the Associate Commissioner in charge of Broadcast Production at the Mountain West, sat down with us to discuss how the events went and his feedback on using PlaySight’s portable GO technology for the first time.
What was your experience like using PlaySight’s GO units to stream the Championships?
Tripp: Using the PlaySight Go Units to stream our men’s and women’s tennis championships at the same time went as smooth as I could have hoped. At one point during the Championships we were running 24 courts at the same time.
What type of feedback did you get from coaches?
Tripp: The best feedback I got was from a coach that had recently coached in another conference. He said that they never got coverage like this at their conference tournament. They would get the championship final broadcasted and that was it. He had never seen such comprehensive coverage of a tennis championship.
Have you live streamed the Championships before?
Tripp: We have streamed these championships before but not in this style. Our stream has been like a golf tournament where we have cameras on each court but we bounce around from court to court to show the best moments, the finishing points and the best matches. The coaches and fans appreciated what we were doing but most fans of tennis want to watch a specific match and stick with it.
Any other feedback?
Tripp: I was very happy to find out there was a solution like this out there. Especially for the tennis facility we went to. The facility was beautiful and the setting was great but they had very little power and NO internet. Most of the tennis facilities I’ve visited have not invested in the type of internet connectivity we would need to pull off a championship stream like we did. That’s why having an all-encompassing solution like this was so amazing. To have a portable pack, that can broadcast a court with no external power source or external internet connectivity (other than the LiveU unit) is amazing. We’ve been brainstorming other ways we can use this technology through PlaySight and look forward to continuing our tennis relationship with PlaySight. We’ll see what other ideas we can come up with for this amazing technology.