TORONTO – The two Canadian sports network titans are finally apart.
For over seven years, Rogers Sportsnet and TSN, the top two sports channels in Canada, were cheek to cheek at 9 Channel Nine Court in Agincourt in North Toronto. The situation was a legacy of Sportsnet’s launch in 1998 as CTV Sportsnet. At that time, it was a state-of-the-art studio within the CTV complex.
But when CTV bought TSN, moving it into the same CTV campus and sold its majority interest in Sportsnet to Rogers in 2001, the regional sports network stayed put. It was a little unusual, to say the least, that such competitors on every front would sit down for lunch in the same cafeteria and park their cars in the same lot. (It worked out okay for Sportsnet anchor Sean McCormick and TSN anchor Jennifer Hedger, who are now married to each other.)
Oh there were years where rumors were rampant about an impending Sportsnet move to the Rogers Centre or Rogers Broadcasting on Lakeshore Ave, or some other places, but finally – bursting at the seams in Agincourt, construction began in the fall of 2007 at the downtown Rogers Communications headquarters and on April 30th, the new Sportsnet studio went live.
The studio and offices for the 300-plus folks who make up Sportsnet are housed in three floors at 1 Mount Pleasant, in the former home to the Rogers Communications network operations centre, which was relocated to the company’s facilities in Brampton.
It’s a fully high-definition studio whose backbone is a Quantel server that holds and distributes all of the channel’s content, which now completely file-based. The server can hold up to 900 hours of HD content, is fully searchable and accessible by 180 PCs in the building which are performing various creative tasks for the broadcasts. Over 250 kms of new cable was installed inside the Sportsnet studio and offices.
Production has been modernized so that everything is far more efficient and elegant – not to mention geared towards being able to take content and spread it across TV, on demand, broadband and wireless platforms.
The key to making everything work, says Sportsnet’s vice-president of operations, Virgina Gibberd, is getting the metadata right, so that all bits of content – even the ones eventually off-loaded from the Quantel server into other long-term storage – are fully searchable and useable across all seven ways content is ingested into the system and on all platforms they may be displayed on. The “naming conventions” is something Gibberd says the employees worked hard to develop, so that the content’s metadata was consistent across the company. “It was one of the most challenging things they had to do,” she said.
Master control for all Sportsnet’s regional channels (Pacific, West, Ontario and East) is housed here and the MC is expandable for up to six more channels, if required, as well. However, one of the neatest parts of the master control is the 30-tons of steel left exposed at the back of that room.
The girders were made necessary after the company took out a concrete pillar on the first floor to make room for the wide open space the studio itself required (which features a 74-feet wide screen).
In fact, engineers had to go four stories deep into the underground parking lot to reinforce the building and then create the steel girder design which would continue to hold up the 20-plus story building when the first-floor pillar was knocked down. The design, which took eight months of engineering by Halsall Engineers (the same group that took the Royal Ontario Museum from paper to construction) is up for a number of architectural awards, actually, said Gibberd.
Sportsnet president Doug Beeforth says a downtown studio will yield huge benefits for the sports channel, including such things as getting athletes into the studio. Instead of battling traffic from the Rogers Centre or Air Canada Centre to where the studio had been (an hour-long ride during rush hour), it’s a far shorter distance to travel.
“Nick (Kypreos) and Darren (Millard), as soon as they’re done (their noon-time show at The Fan 590, Rogers sports radio station located one building over), they could be over here in five minutes if need be,” said Beeforth. “Before they spent a lot of time in the car back and forth. It’s closer for them and for all of our news guys in this city to be close to Air Canada Centre and close to Rogers Centre whereas before there was a bit of a drive. It’s a lot easier on the administration side, too. Now I can be over in Tony’s office or over to see Ted in 10 minutes.”
And with an owner steeped in technology as Ted Rogers is, Beeforth believes his station was able to build the best of the best. “Ted has outdone himself here with what he’s allowed us to do,” added Beeforth.
And as for that pillar that had to go in order to maintain Sportsnet’s open-studio, high-ceiling concept, most companies likely would have gone to another location rather than re-engineer the building to remove a huge chunk of concrete that holds up the building. “One of the great things about Ted is that he meets a challenge head on and doesn’t say we can’t do that,” says Beeforth. “He says ‘what’s it going to take to do it? Or how do we solve this challenge?’”
