 Hello everyone, I'm Patty Gunnell, Vice President of Strategic Accounts, ReelUS. Today we're here to talk to Vinny Senescale from Firehouse Productions who is living currently in the NBA bubble. We thought we'd spend some time with Vinny today talking about how, what he's done there and for several months lived within the bubble and then of course he had the challenge of designing the entire communications and belero system for the NBA network and so I think today we'd like to spend some time with him to ask him how he did what he did. Vinny, how are you today? Hi Patty, doing very well thank you. Good. You're on site presently in the arena for we're going to be starting game four of the finals this evening so came in a little early take you guys through what we've been doing here and how the process came about several months ago. We started work back in well I'm going to say back in March when the NBA reached out to Firehouse I mean we've had a long-standing relationship there and normally we do their more special events not their typical day-to-day you know we've done the NBA all-star on the draft and overseas games for them things that are not just their standard season but when the NBA wanted to restart the 2020 season it was a special event because it was not taking place in any of their standard arenas they chose the worldwide sports down in Orlando at Disney and basically needed three courts to be built from scratch with you know the added need to have PA for the court it originally started out as one location then grew to two then grew to three and then once they had all that finalized the challenge was okay how are we linking this now for communication so we started in preliminary talks that said back in like March April and May came around and we started to bring the team together brought on Luis Espanel also a Firehouse employee who heads up a lot of our large projects for wireless and communications and we went obviously right to artists and the initial concept was that we were going to have just a few frames in one venue and then when they added more venues we were just going to treat them all as independent projects but as we got closer and closer to coming on site which we came on site July 1st so once we got into June and they realized it was going to be two networks it's going to be Turner and ESPN so now we're talking about six broadcast trucks across three venues and then you know they wanted as minimal staff as possible which meant that the venues were no longer going to be independent that everything was going to be tied together so we had to rethink you know the network from from being three separate shows to being one large show and that was really where we began and that was that was when we set about looking at the hardware and you know frame count and panel count fiber infrastructure which all the fiber infrastructure is provided through the NBA to a third party so we're really just looking at locations where we have hardware and then telling them our fiber needs and then they're providing fiber infrastructure joint effort to bring network this this large up online that's intense now now how long did it take you to kind of start from beginning to end of putting that on all down on paper so to speak initially it was myself and Louise and then we brought in Scott Hoskins who also handled all of our internal communication infrastructure so we sat down and put it out on paper and over the course of probably two to three weeks came up with the initial system design and then we we came into the shop probably about two weeks prior to coming on site put it all together you know gave it a dry run make sure that it was all going to work and then we brought it down to Orlando where we had two weeks to do the install got it all up and and running ready for the for the first set of scrimmages now were there's challenge what were the I guess what were the obvious all right not so much obvious but the challenges that came along that kind of three-year curve that maybe readle was able to help you out with or just that you're able to overcome and so just getting over the initial design phase of like okay it's going to be one network that's going to link all three venues together and all six broadcast trucks but then in addition to that the staff that was here with the nba and with the broadcast companies they needed to maintain social distance so it began series of routing efforts to try and make it so that the the statisticians and the people at the scores table the coaches could all communicate with each other and with the referees who were on the court where typically referees would just be running and be relaying information saying hey that was three points or that was that was a foul now there's a large piece of plexi that fits in front of the scores table and so they cannot hear so what we ended up doing was putting microphones on the ref and giving comms to the coaches and now there's discrete logic functions built in so that the coaches can communicate specifically either to broadcast or to just the statisticians or to just the game caller and the coaches likewise can communicate to just the people that they need to speak to so and that came that came after the fact when people started to think about well you know how are we going to be able to effectively communicate with all the social distancing measures that are in place so yeah the you know the and then of course there's the redundancy of the of the artist ring and the logic functions all sort of came together to make it possible and then of course integrating bolero meant that you know we've got a there was at one point there was 116 users on bolero so that made it really the only option for wireless communication as well the environment really became seamless let's say naturally but you know just in design it was there to expand would you say you use more logic on this job than normal or is this about oh yeah absolutely no there's there's far more logic built into this than than project that i've been into i can jump into the file and show you and so yeah you can see here in the left is the tree so it's uh i believe it's a total of 12 frames and you can see that it's basically uh four in the arena three in the uh in the hp center three in the visa center and two out in the truck compound the two out in the truck compound one of which is a 128 and 64 and that's where we're interfacing all of uh all of the six broadcast trucks and then if you go to the logic function you can see there's literally 100 sources in destination some of some of the more killer ones are as i said um uh the the rest mic for example let me just get to that so you can see here's what this is just this is from the v so v signifies the visa so there's there's a logic here so that when the rest uh you know when the rest talk it'll go it'll go from there it'll go to the faustex so we have faustex speakers at the tourist table inside so that certain members can hear what the what the reps are saying and that's across each venue you'll find um a logic of that nature so when you see when i search by ref you can see the the there's one here for each and now ref mics one ref mic two the arena ref the hp ref so and the visa ref so there's uh also another logic here uh so it doesn't look like you you were going to be able to do a lot of this like pre-planned you had to do most of this and sort all this out mostly when you got on the job site didn't you it this is all something that kind of yeah it is um and so you know you can you can see here we have a status this is something that's checking the status of the ref mic so that if for whatever reason the circuit for the ref mic doesn't doesn't go open it's updating with the clock of every one second so we're checking on status as well as where as well as routing the mic so that's a big part of the of the logic some a lot of these other logic functions that are in here are um it's it's so if any one of these panels goes offline it will automatically signal a beacon back at our home base to let the operator know that if you're there hey this panel is offline or if you were away when you came back it will still flash um so that's that's what the the infinite loop function is so and then I got there's a little bit more detail here in the um this is the layout of the frames as it goes logically so the solid lines are the primary fiber loop dotted lines are the redundant loop um and as you can see it it all starts here at the truck and then from there it it's branching out and I've got a uh photo here so this is the actual physical photo of the 128 and the 64 out in the truck compound this is where the fiber patch is made here to make the entire diagram and then this down here is going moving on that would be the bolero which primary in a backup spoken hub uh network for the bolero here you see we've got third party ferro fish that we're using the interface so we're tying entirely analog into these two artist frames but as you can see if I zoom in a little bit more here you can see that we're you know Dante to the three Espen trucks and then this is a spare then we're matty to the three of the Turner trucks and then nba tv we were interfacing Dante so and then here we've got media converters for the various some people were multi mode some people were single mode so that's what's going on there internally though we've got it's all cat five coming analog out of these ferro fish into the two artist frames moving back you can see there's a significant number of of bolero users but they're all distributed throughout the as67 cards are distributed throughout the network so it's not it's not centralized decentralized and and and the clock is set so there's there's there's no master at the floating it's a floating master on the bolero side this takes us into the bolero and you can see again the primary network solid line and the redundant network dotted line so here's a hub and then there's three spokes and a hub and three spokes uh will you be our links features on the luminex to have the network and standby over here so that if any one of these branches goes down one of these branches will pick right up did you guys use primarily only bolero or were there other other manufacturers intercoms function at the same time as far as wireless hundred percent bolero between us and turner and espn okay so uh now i guess was there any specific obstacle that you had to overcome from a technology standpoint with riddle or the things that you had to even we had to stretch a little bit there to accomplish or in the com system as a whole or was it just a pretty much just go um there's there's some there's there's some there's some routing that's going on in and out of the the artist matrix i mean we've got some external cont mixing console uh to do some of the routing functions that we needed to for the ref mics and and things of that nature even outside the logic functions but for the most part uh it was all handled you know internally in the in the artist the artist has enough versatility between the the pre-programmed functions and then when you add on top of that the logic functions it was really just a matter of of sitting down and talking it out and drawing it out and and programming it now do you have a process of what you choose to use on a particular job and i i just you just know what you want to use or just i don't know in your case do you just always choose to be real or do you have other other systems that you you know uh there i mean of course there are other options there are other manufacturers you know i i usually start by getting involved with the producers and they talk about their vision of what they're going to do i get an idea of how many departments you know how many how many players are going to be involved and take notes and and and look at look at really port counts is where i start and uh you know if we're talking about just you know 10 20 30 users you can kind of make that work in a lot of different ways but when you start to get above that number uh then i start to to lean into to saying okay we should go with with reedle products i mean most of the time people don't really question it because they're coming to us they're looking for us to design what gets done um so you know there's there's there's a little bit of level of both with the relationship we have with the nba now they know that we're going to be coming using reedle systems and that and that's sort of expected so yeah i won't say that i design solely with reedle in mind but uh i i'm very familiar with the product so i i know where i'm going uh with that in mind let's just put it that way but we interface you know the the trucks have a lot of rts and adam still that's still legacy product so we're interfacing that you know via matty which as i pointed out we're using third party uh products to interface matty but you know in the coming years with 1024 it will interface directly you know to artists um so it's just another reason that we would be leaning on uh on reedle products and particularly the the artist environment with 1024 is going to make it that much more flexible i mean the artist is powerful system but i think i think it was around 1996 or so that it came out so using aes3 technology of course it's amazing how robust it's been for this long you know and now integrated aes67 and then of course uh fully integrate integration of aes67 with 1024 will be something that we're looking forward to that's it it's you know we're definitely becoming a very diverse ecosystem for communication that's for sure well you know i suspect we probably better let you get back to work we could probably talk all about your projects and all the work that you do and i certainly appreciate your time vinyan thank you so much for your uh you know your respect of the product or use of the product and pushing the envelope with it i'm sure every day and i can't say thank you enough on behalf of reedle and from a corporate level i know that uh you are very valuable to us so thank you patty it's nice talking with you and uh i hope that we talk again soon all right well thank you so much and you have a great time and and hopefully you get to go home soon so thanks patty okay thanks a lot viny bye bye bye