Who knew – The Coke bottle at AT&T Park gets a face lift.  In all the time I spend at AT&T Park, I was unaware the Coke bottle gets an annual refurbish.  The crew working on the bottle install new letters and make sure all the lights work, patch it up and paint it for the upcoming season.  BTW, the Coke bottle is 80 feet long with playground slides that will blow bubbles and light up with every Giants home run. 

The field now has no grass, its all sand.  The greens crew has about 3 weeks to get the grass in place for it to be ready for pre-season.  FYI… under the sand, the field sits on a rock bed that sits on a grated steel floor.  This provides sufficient water drainage.  Under this grated steel floor airflow is provided by an massive engine located under the left field bleachers to provide quicker drainage.

Next week, I will start removing some of our older equipment in our TX facility to make room for our new infrastructure.  Will keep you posted.

Nelson Ferreira

Director, Broadcast and Transmission Operations

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The grass is being bulldozed out at AT&T Park to make room for new sod. The new field needs to be in place by March 17th as AT&T Park will be hosting a soccer double header.  First up will be the San Jose Earthquakes vs Houston Dynamo, shortly after, Mexico vs Senegal will play an international friendly. 

There are several projects happening at AT&T Park and one in particular that involves MediaOne. The Giants are considering expanding the broadcast infrastructure out to Willie Mays Plaza (WMP).  This area is often used by broadcasters for pre & post game shows.  The project asks for two 3 inch conduits to be buried under the plaza so broadcast cable can be installed into a new tie box @ WMP. The cable includes 12 single mode fiber, 6 video and 16 audio all of which are 1300 feet in length.  This cable will be pulled all the way back to the truck dock and engineered into our existing infrastructure.  This project will make broadcasting from WMP more efficient.  

At the same time, I am in the planning phases of upgrading our transmission facility at AT&T Park.  The installation will include a new Utah 400 HD-SDI/3G router along with Bright Eye DA’s, Evertz and Aja components.  

The home opener is on April 13th vs the Pittsburg Pirates.

Nelson Ferreira

Al Gore’s Climate Reality team called on MediaOne Services again to head up a remote shoot in Dhaka, Bangladesh. This was a 4-day production that traveled from Dhaka to Khulna and then on to Shyamnager where Producer/Photograher Wahidur Khandkar shot his beautiful video.

Handling the difference in time zones, arranging interviews, crew traveling throughout Bangladesh, sometimes by ferry to remote locations, as well as coordinating the rest of the teams in New York, Washington DC, and Los Angeles…all challenges faced in an international production. Since MediaOne is a regular partner with Climate Reality, we’ve learned most…never all…of the ins and outs of global production. Having a wonderfully talented video photographer on the ground is a big plus.

Wahidur used a Canon 7D to shoot stunning interviews and b-roll and then sent his files via ftp to New York and San Francisco. 

Rich Costello. Director of Production.

Links:

Wahidur Khandkar’s website 

A few days ago, I linked to a Creative Cow blog post by Mark Roudonis, SVP of Post Production, Bunim/Murray Productions. They do, among other shows, “Project Runway” and “The Real World”. The topic: going from Final Cut to Avid and back again.

Stephane Savard, CTO of Meetrical posted a comment worth reposting here:

Yeah, their experience pretty much match my feeling. Apple doesn’t need the pro video market anymore and focus heavily on the consumer market. In doing so, it offers tools like Final Cut Pro X for small independent producer to produce content for the web and don’t care much about the much smaller number of professional who have large scale needs. They needed them 10 years ago when Apple was not as hot as now, but not anymore. On the other end, Avid has only the pro market, it’s mission critical for them, they are also a much humbler and better company to deal with now (as opposed to the old Avid). For that reason they are my first choice for an editing platform for my next project.

Your comments welcome.

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Additional Reading:

Creative Cow Avid vs Final Cut Pro Forum

This interview was on Marketplace from American Public Radio. 

Kai Ryssdal: We’re spending a little time on the media competition this week. Television, and the future of it. What that means for the companies that deliver programming, the devices that’ll do it and the advertisers who’ll pay for it.

That’s right up Jim Lanzone’s alley. He’s the president of CBS Interactive, that’s the CBS network’s online content division, which means he spends a lot of time where the Internet and the future of TV intersect. He joins us from the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Good to have you with us.

Jim Lanzone: Thanks for having me.

Ryssdal: So this is a kind of fundamental question, I guess, but what does the future of television look like from where you sit, inside the industry?

Lanzone: This year CES kind of reminds me of that old Yogi Berra quote: You can observe a lot just by watching. It’s television everywhere. And before TV was just on your TV, and now you’re essentially being able to access it on every device you can imagine — so your phone, your tablet, but even places like your refrigerator.

Ryssdal: And then how do you as a content guy, how do you provide content to all those different platforms? Do you just spread out the same content, or what do you do?

Lanzone: Really online content, which is what we focus on, brings a new dimension into it. Your DVR brought time-shifting, so you didn’t have to watch it — just at a scheduled appointment time. And online lets you do place-shifting, which means you can watch it anywhere. And so, it’s really on-demand viewing than appointment viewing that you would normally find on real TV.

Ryssdal: What does that mean, then, for programmers? Do they have to come up with all different kinds of content? You’ve got you and doing online, and does CBS the broadcast network have to worry about other things?

Lanzone: Yeah, it actually opens up a whole new avenue for a new kind of content. So we’re not just restricted to 30 minutes or an hour for a show on television; we can have short-form videos.

Ryssdal: So we had a piece yesterday — Jennifer Collins, our reporter there, did a story in which she was talking about Louis C.K. and how he recorded his show at the Beacon Theater and put it out online for anybody to pay whatever it was, $10, $15 to get it. Not a dime of that went to studios, went to networks, went to any intermediary, and I imagine that must scare the heck out of you guys.

Lanzone: No, I think it actually just supports the model of premium content. We’re in the business of producing it in huge quantities. He produced one show, but we’re both in the business of making our content and selling it. So really I think it just goes to underscore the fact that the future’s going to be full of all kinds of devices, lots of different people trying to deliver that content — but at the end of the day, content is what’s truly valuable.

Ryssdal: None of that content, though, comes free, right, Jim? So you have to get the advertisers on board as well.

Lanzone: Right. And these new avenues of delivering content actually have opened up new business models. So for example, we’re able to not just sell advertising against all these shows, but we can also sell the shows on demand. So you can pay per show that you want to download, or you can pay by subscription. So we have a “Big Brother” show online that you can subscribe to.

Ryssdal: All right, so this is going to sound like I don’t know what’s going on, but “Big Brother”? That’s still going? That’s a series? The people in the house?

Lanzone: “Big Brother” on CBS, yes. Big series.

Ryssdal: Who knew? Whatever.

Lanzone: We actually had hundreds of thousands of people subscribe to watch different variations of that show online. So not just watch the hour it’s on television, traditional television, but also uber fans of “Big Brother” — and there are some — can then interact with that content, get additional videos online by subscribing.

Ryssdal: So once you get past the hardware, the future of television — at least from where you sit — is content, content, content, baby.

Lanzone: Right, and more content in more places. And at the end of the day, CBS Interactive and CBS will be there delivering that content to you.

Ryssdal: Jim Lanzone is the president of CBS Interactive, that’s the network’s online content division. We got him on the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show out in Las Vegas. Jim, thanks a lot.

Lanzone: Thanks for having me.

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Related Viewing:

Blog.toggle.com, which is also where we got the iPhone image.