NFL Media hosts ‘one of world’s largest Dante networks’

When the NFL began plans more than four years ago to move its headquarters from Culver City, California, to a new facility a few miles away in Inglewood, Los Angeles it had a vision to create one of the world’s most state-of-the-art, IP-based broadcast production facilities.

Opening just before the 2021 season kickoff, this IP-based, 4K and HDR-capable production facility employs more than 1,000 people, and houses five main stages, all supported by many production-control rooms, audio-control rooms, and workstations.

According to Bruce Goldfeder, vice president of broadcast engineering at NFL Media, this production facility has 31 direct fibre audio locations from the building to nearby SoFi Stadium, plus six direct fibre audio locations throughout the complex.

The headquarters is also connected to all 30 NFL stadiums via 10-Gbps interface and all 32 NFL practice facilities. The post-production operation consists of 18 high-end edit rooms, two audio-sweetening suites, and 90 VDI thin-client desktop editors that can be accessed from anywhere in the building, and remotely.

NFL Media is currently producing 1080p60 broadcasts with Dolby 5.1 audio, but the infrastructure is capable of 4K60 with Dolby Atmos 7.2.4 audio and can scale to any format in the future, including HDR or 8K. To bring this all together, NFL Media has nearly 18,000 Dante audio network connections, 16,000 MADI connections, and over 2,000 Riedel intercom channels.

For audio production, the various studios are equipped with a mix of eleven System T Dante-enabled broadcast production audio consoles from Solid State Logic.

“This is one of the largest, if not the largest, Dante installations in the world, and the NFL team picked SSL in part because we offer the most Dante-integrated broadcast production consoles available,” said Phil Wagner, senior vice president at Solid State Logic. “The Dante ecosystem is huge and it continues to grow because Dante is incredibly solid, flexible, and secure.”