The NBA put together 28 Zoom carts in various locations around the Orlando and Bradenton campuses, and each Heckler AV Display Cart was outfitted with a DTEN D7 55-inch touchscreen with integrated mic and speaker and a customized BirdDog Eyes P100 1080p PTZ Camera.
For 13 weeks consisting of a shortened regular season and ultra-competitive playoffs, the NBA used the customized carts to hold more than 3,700 Zoom meetings and webinars, stream over 3 million press minutes, and collect more than 2,100 hours of recordings, making this pandemic-era NBA season one of the largest continual Zoom events on record.
“The cloud-to-cloud delivery of content being captured by Zoom, the real-time streaming to Akamai for regional sports networks and other partners to consume the pressers live out of Orlando - it’s all unprecedented,” Halton said. “We’ve never done something at this scale before, and it was only possible through listening, adapting, and working tirelessly to execute it.”
Halton listed a few specific Zoom aspects that helped make this a successful endeavor for the NBA:
- The self-service nature of the Zoom platform made it easy for anyone to schedule, start, and record media events
- The ability to support custom live streaming of each interview
- The Zoom professional services team that helped manage the overall operation and troubleshoot issues
The flexibility and ease of use of the Zoom cloud platform helped make those 13 successful weeks possible for the NBA. Zoom plugged right into the NBA’s virtual content network to easily acquire and distribute media in a closed, safe environment.
As the NBA looks to the future and continues to expand its use for content acquisition and distribution, this type of operation, one that is highly technical and at massive scale - coupled with the power of AT&T, the official 5G wireless network of the NBA - could very well change how news, media, and other sports leagues deliver their content in the future.
________________________________________________________________________
By the numbers
22 NBA teams
12 WNBA teams
200+ games and scrimmages
28 Zoom carts
3,700+ Zoom meetings and webinars
2,100+ hours of recordings
3 million+ press minutes streamed