TORONTO – With just over a week until the puck drops on the 2014-2015 NHL season, Sportsnet unveiled its new hockey studio Monday, billed as the largest, most innovative sports studio in the country. And with a $4.5 million price tag, it’s probably the most expensive, too.
Located in the CBC headquarters in downtown Toronto, the Hockey Central Studio is 11,000 square feet with nine separate sets and 52 monitors, including a massive 11 x 38 ft. ultra-high-resolution monitor that executives referred to as ‘Goliath’. It also includes a rotating main anchor desk with a 360° open environment allowing cameras to shoot from any angle, an LED floor that displays videos and graphics and leads into a giant video monitor wall, and 14 cameras that can shoot up to three live broadcasts for three different networks at any one time.
Designed by Jack Morton PDG, the company that designed the sets for Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium at Vancouver 2010 and London 2012, the set was eight months in the making, beginning with the design phase and coming full circle with the construction in mid-June and finishing in late September.
Sportsnet also showed off its flashy new graphics and animation, a package that includes 10 different custom opening animations, 250 player animations, and more than 1,000 support animations designed to enhance storytelling and game analysis for viewers. Hockey fans will also hear fresh musical packages during NHL on Sportsnet broadcasts, with Canadian composer Stephan Moccio’s new version of the current Hockey Night in Canada song and Sportsnet theme music – both of which were performed by an all-Canadian 50-piece orchestra.
The NHL on Sportsnet will deliver 554 national and regional regular season NHL games across nine networks, including CBC, City, Sportsnet (East, Ontario, West, and Pacific), Sportsnet One, Sportsnet 360 and FX Canada.
