How Did It Go?

The last post was full of doom and dread.
Basketball was nigh and I had a great deal of anxiety bubbling up from the pit of my stomach. I posted some stories that have instilled these feelings inside my very fiber but trust me, there are many more of these stories going back more than a decade. I begin thinking about basketball as soon as we can see the light at the end of the football season.

Now the madness is gone from my March. Basketball is over at the Dome and we've survived.
In fact we had an almost perfect tournament.
"Almost" means we did have a couple issues during the event but we took care of them quickly, cleanly, and quietly. I'm sure that most of the attendees would never even know we had any problems. I'm certain that the client has left with a feeling that we did a very good job. I am very relieved.

The Cobra Net that we've been using for a whole football season was experiencing some intermittent drop-outs. It sounded like the announcer was stuttering a little mid-word and the tournament director noticed it just as we were deciding what to do about it. We have a different configuration for basketball since we're mixing from just off the court instead of up in the booth. To do this, we're using the Dome's regular network backbone so I asked the IT guys if they could snoop into the VLAN but they didn't see anything wrong. We simply waited until half time to switch our feed to the system from the network to the regular old copper tie-lines we have used since for ever and it was "fixed". It's always good when you can go to the client and tell them "It's all better now." It's much better than "Well, it stopped but we don't know why it happened or if it'll crop up again." Trust me on this.
I want to investigate this a little more because we couldn't pin the problem on any one piece of the chain and I'd like to know that we can use the Cobra Net with confidence. It's more convenient and we get more tie-lines to the booth that way. I'll post about the search for truth soon.

The other snag on the weekend was TV related. We have a very (overly) complex cable TV infrastructure that feeds something north of 700 LCD TVs with a custom feed from Comcast, some channels produced by Dome Productions in-house, and the DirecTV Sunday Ticket NFL games. There are commercial HD sets in the suites with their own custom channel line-up, HD LCDs all over the concourses, clubs, restaurants, and bathrooms (yep, all the public restrooms), and a few SD sets around the building in various areas.
I got a call on Thursday morning that the people in the suites couldn't find the channel that was supposed to have the SEC basketball tournament games. When I checked, sure enough, the channel wasn't there. Later in the weekend we found that ESPN-U was in the slot where ESPN2 had been for two years. Our patrons wanted to watch basketball and we had Lacrosse on the sets...
Comcast feeds us a custom line-up with some channels in the clear that would normally require a cable box. They did this for us so we wouldn't have to have hundreds of boxes all over the building. The trade for this is our having to type in a silly-long channel number like 83.846 to see ESPN. Unfortunatly, if they seem to move channels fairly often and with no notice so I get these calls on event day. "Hey, what happened to NFL Network?" I don't know where it is now and I haven't heard from anyone at Comcast about what I'm supposed to do about it so... uhhh punt.
What I DID was call DirecTV, order whatever sports package gave me the games I needed, paid for that, and used our Sunday Ticket receivers to transpose Fox Sport South onto two of our in-house channels. It took me all of about fifteen minutes once I thought-up the plan to get the SEC games up in HD in the suites.

That crisis solved, I mostly spent the tournament sitting next to Dan, our A1 at our court side FOH table, chatting with fans, updating my Facebook status via Twitter, and eating Twizzlers (the official snack food of the Dome Audio Crew at Basketball Events). That's a view from my seat at the head of this post.
If you watched the games on TV, you'd have been very lucky to see me and that's just how I like it.