Even without on-site production control rooms in Qatar in 2022, Fox Sports is relying on a critical technical team at the IBC in Los Angeles to keep World Cup signal routes stable—connecting 16 match venues to production in Pico through BRISK flypacks, Appear
When a World Cup is played on home soil, it’s easy to picture everything happening inside a stadium. But inside the machinery of modern broadcast, the story starts far earlier—at the IBC, in Los Angeles, where Fox Sports is keeping its signal lifeline ready for whatever the network might throw back.
The operation matters because there still needs to be a team at the IBC. and for Mike Davies—coordinating technical manager at Fox Sports—to make sure the connections between venues and the IBC don’t fail when the show depends on them. Davies says his group of 50 is coordinating while there are no production control rooms on-site in Qatar in 2022. and that “remote production capability is enhanced” as technology has advanced.
A key part of that job is handling IT connections from HBS to Fox’s broadcast chain. Davies explains that HBS manages which providers can deliver IT services between the venue and the IBC. so the IBC presence is required to “pick up those connections to the 16 match venues without any issues.” Once those links are secure. the IBC plays its role as an essential IT hub for six BRISK kit signals flowing onward to the production control rooms in Pico.
Even the format choices are built around reducing risk and complexity. Davies says HDR 1080P is now the native format in Pico, so there’s no need for LUT conversions. And with the World Cup running at a frame rate of 59.94, he says there’s no need for frame rate converters.
Inside the IBC, the team isn’t just passively receiving streams. The operation includes Riedel communications, Sony camera shading, engineering, audio, and IT networking. Signals arrive from HBS and Fox remote production teams. are managed. and then delivered onward to Pico—where the shows are assembled.
Davies also describes how encoding and transport are set up for resilience. For encoding. Fox has gone with Appear X20 and uses 60 JPEG-XS paths via two 100 Gbps diverse circuits to Pico. two 100 Gbps to its facility in Tempe. AZ. and two 100 Gbps between those locations. There is also a disaster recovery gallery in New York.
But resilience isn’t just a backup plan stored somewhere else. Davies says resilience is built into the network: “If we were to lose a path between us and Pico our network automatically reroutes the traffic via Tempe.”
He says the move to Appear is about more than efficiency. With the SMPTE 2022-7 standard used for the JPEG-XS paths. lost packets on the red or blue circuits aren’t visible to viewers. Davies contrasts it with a decoder that used 2022-6. saying that in that case a reroute would be visible as “a half frame of black.”.
Not every part of the production demands the same immediacy or bandwidth. Fox also runs 26 Appear HEVC paths to Pico for signals that can tolerate a little latency and use smaller bandwidth. Davies describes what those paths are for: press conferences, fan reaction feeds produced by HBS, and match action replays.
That pipeline runs alongside Fox’s field system. Fox has six BRISK systems in the field—8-to-12 camera systems deployed the day before a game at any match venue. BRISK is an acronym for “Broadcast Remote IP Studio Kit. ” and Davies lays out how the concept and build came together: the idea was developed by Fox Sports VP. Field Operations and Engineering Kevin Callahan and Doug McGee. consulting engineer at Fox; designed by Diversified; and built in-house in the Fox warehouse in Vegas by Lucas Pierce and Aaron Stevens.
The BRISK units are EVS Cerebrum controlled 2110 redundant systems with an Arista IP backbone, supported by Neuron video I/O, Calrec & Direct Out audio equipment, and Sony HDC5500 cameras from Game Creek.
From the field to Pico, the production workflow is built around flexibility. Davies says Pico can cut between shots from the venue and cameras from other stages from one production gallery. enhanced with reporter cameras at pitch side using LiveU bonded cellular encoders racked remotely with CyanView Rio telemetry. Pico. meanwhile. can receive up to 48 signals from the BRISK kits using Appear encoding. facilitating Fox Digital services as well as the broadcast shows.
The IBC isn’t the only location in the loop. Davies says the BRISK kits are supported remotely from Dallas, where the engineering team—many of whom are British—also handles shading of Sony cabled and RF cameras using Sony CNA 2 cameranetwork adapters.
That shading setup connects to how FIFA and HBS run their camera control. Davies explains that FIFA and HBS use an enhanced CNA2 firmware version for the high number of cameras and settings they want to manage centrally. “We didn’t need those enhanced features. but we did need the CNAs to steer video control easily between multiple sites easily. ” he says.
Audio operations are routed with similar discipline. On the audio side. the IBC operation receives MADI streams alongside embedded audio in incoming video. including bespoke commentary feeds and enhanced audio packages from HBS. Two Calrec Impulse cores—main and redundant—handle audio processing and stream assembly, along with Direct Out Prodigy MX. Davies frames the audio delivery philosophy around consistency and simplicity for operators downstream.
He explains the intent through how replay works: “We like to deliver things in multiple ways that would suit each use case when it arrives.” When signals come off the EVS, Davies says replay A1 can push up a single fader and have the 5.1 as it was recorded.
The signal workflow begins even before match day. Davies says the workflow begins the day prior when circuits at the venues are lit up and made available to rights holders like Fox. Those signals enter the Fox IBC production area via the Fox Sports Jewel Event system. FSJE1 is physically located at the IBC in Dallas and serves as the network hub for all incoming venue signals and the primary engineering and shading operation. while a second FSJE2 is in New York.
FSJE1 includes TAG Multiviewers, the EVS Cerebrum integration and control platform, Calrec cores, and Arista 7508 switches that handle uncompressed SMPTE ST 2110 traffic on both red and blue sides of the plant, along with other gear.
A major engineering decision shaped the way streams can be reused across sites. Davies says the decision to make JPEG XS traffic multicast-capable across the WAN was deliberate engineering work. He credits the network engineering team of Marc Fleury. Armin Vahaian. and Bryan Kolodziej for the effort to run multicast JPEG XS traffic over the wide-area network.
The result is a practical advantage: the same stream made in a BRISK can be decoded not only in Pico, but also in IBC for shading and in FSJE2 in New York. Davies describes it as the remote studio stream passing through the Fox plant as network traffic, with the stream not decoded and re-encoded.
Signals leave Dallas pre-formatted for their destinations. with transmission-ready packages going directly to Fox’s transmission facility in Tempe and to Pico. Davies says those transmission signals go out in a form that is ready to go to air. He also says Fox delivers production versions with bespoke audio assignments that can be ingested in EVS plant in Pico and used in production control rooms.
Comms matter too. Davies says the Fox Sports comms team at the IBC ensures communication is in place between Pico, the IBC, and the venues.
To keep all of it under control, Fox has deployed a newly deployed network monitoring solution from Grafana. Davies describes it as giving the engineering team real-time visibility into traffic flows across interconnected sites—watching 45 gigabits of red-path traffic to Pico. the links to Tempe. and connections to the disaster recovery gallery in New York—so the system can flag any circuit loss before it becomes a viewer-facing problem.
He adds that if a fiber circuit is cut, Wide Area Network traffic rules automatically reroute content via Tempe and across inter-site 100Gb circuits so it wouldn’t be noticed on the JPEG XS paths.
Fox’s IBC operation includes 136 outbound. 48 inbound. and 4 satellite paths. alongside the BRISK 48 paths inbound and 16 outbound with LiveU redundancy. all at 1080P HDR with 5.1 audio. Davies says the design follows a “lifeboat feeds” philosophy—signal paths that deliberately bypass the primary 2110 infrastructure in the event of unexpected failure. or via satellite in the event of total circuit loss.
He acknowledges a hard truth of real-world production: even with 2110, “you still can’t get away from some patch cords to move emergency video signals around the kit.”
Fox Sports IBC World Cup BRISK Appear X20 JPEG XS Tempe Pico SMPTE 2022-7 Grafana EVS Cerebrum SMPTE ST 2110 LiveU HDR 1080P 59.94
So basically LA is doing all the work then? Wild.
I don’t even get why there weren’t control rooms there, that sounds like asking for problems. But hey if their “lifeline” is stable then okay. Still, 16 venues?? That’s gotta be chaos.
Wait, I thought Qatar had everything set up like normal because it’s the World Cup. If there’s no on-site control room in 2022 then who’s even pressing the buttons when stuff goes wrong? Remote capability enhanced… sounds like a fancy way of saying hope the internet doesn’t crash.
IBClife… I swear broadcasters act like it’s magic but it’s just cables and IT. “BRISK flypacks” sounds like something from a movie, not sports. Also they say it connects venues to production in Pico, but didn’t Fox used to do it all from the stadium? Maybe I’m mixing it up with another year, but every time it’s “remote” I worry about lag or someone forgetting a connection.