Dalet To Be Gatekeeper of Content at Pittsburgh Penguins’ New Home

The NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins have selected Dalet Enterprise Edition as the content-management system for the team’s state-of-the-art production center.

The new Consol Energy Center is considered one of the most progressive sports-media-production venues in the U.S. The arena is designed to engage the team’s multigenerational fan base with an array of multimedia experiences, including media kiosks and LED displays at every turn. Behind the scenes, the Penguins’ in-house production unit conjures the multimedia magic for fan audiences and for internal corporate use with a slick, streamlined, collaborative workflow.

“The Consol Energy Center will incorporate the very latest in media-communications technology offering a wide range of interactive and media-rich viewing platforms. including an HD Mitsubishi Diamond Vision scoreboard, LEDs throughout the stadium, special club-seating media options, and real-time game viewing with interactive options for Web and mobile viewers,” said Chris DeVivo, director of media technology for the team. “Dalet is the gatekeeper of content, and its flexible workflow ties into the back-office IT infrastructure, allowing us to better control distribution of content and precisely target game content to the right platform and, ultimately, the right audience.”

Dalet will integrate the Pittsburgh Penguins’ production systems and content outlets through its advanced Media Asset Management (MAM) framework, aggregating content and associated metadata from melts, ISO and arena cameras, custom logging and stats systems, and various image libraries into a central content-rich repository equipped with an enterprise search engine accessible through a Web portal.

The workflow will also leverage Dalet’s natively integrated production tools for managing ingest of the team’s special coaches’ cameras, enabling assistant and head coaches to immediately retrieve and analyze game-day and archival material during game intermissions and breaks. The comprehensive workflow administration and automation capabilities will govern access rights, conversions, and distribution rules to publish content to multiple platforms, including Web and archives. This will let the Pittsburgh Penguins better manage video, audio, and still-image assets across all levels of the organization.

“Dalet provides the framework and tools for staff to tap into the immense amount of media that is associated with live events and effectively utilize it,” said Benjamin Desbois, GM, Dalet Digital Media Systems USA. “Dalet’s ingest tools and enterprise search engine enable the coaches not only to review game material during breaks but also to retrieve past-game plays from the archives to analyze the competition.”

The Dalet installation will provide straightforward but well managed access to game content whether video, audio or still images, optimizing the use of assets and greatly improving access to content for non-postproduction staff. Postproduction, multimedia and coaching teams will have a direct access to the central content repository. For corporate-wide viewing of materials via the Dalet Web-based interface, Dalet servers will simultaneously convert all material into low-resolution proxies during ingest. The integrated media-management engine provides enterprise-class multi-tiered storage management to streamline the archiving of materials, transparently managing transfers between online, near-line and offline storage areas.

Leading design of the Consol Energy Center system infrastructure is Dalet business partner Diversified Systems. “We have been spearheading advanced system designs for large-scale sporting arenas for quite some time,” said Diversified Systems SVP Duane Yoslov. “The new Consol Energy Center design has been by far the most aggressive with regards to use of technology.”