As Garrett Hill, director of technology at HuskerVision, explained, since moving to an IP-based signal distribution infrastructure that connects seven main sports facilities/buildings, the biggest benefit has been the "flexibility to work smarter.”
Upon completion of a multi-million-dollar upgrade from existing SDI-based workflows last summer, the production arm of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln Athletics Department can now create more Cornhuskers content, cover more live events, and send virtually any signal to any destination on the 861-acre campus with an elastic, software-defined architecture.
The Road to Efficiency
HuskerVision's journey to the SMPTE ST 2110 format began in 2023 with a transition to audio over IP. Lessons learned during that time helped devise a plan for video a year later.
“Doing audio first seemed like the right move,” recalled Hill. “We learned a lot of the networking requirements more intensely by doing that. We learned the importance of boundary clocking, device discovery, stream management, and PTP on switches. And now that we’ve done both audio and video, I can tell you that audio is easier to deploy, although not without its challenges as well.”
Under Hill’s guidance, the school’s HuskerVision team unveiled a completely renovated second floor of an existing building in September 2025. It now works out of a 25,200-square-foot production hub featuring three SMPTE 2110, 4K HDR-capable control rooms, complete with new 4K switcher and camera technology from Grass Valley and a HOME IP orchestration software environment from Lawo. Lawo A__UHD Core audio DSP engines and mc²56 consoles were part of the audio upgrade. (Meanwhile, the old football offices of North Stadium now house more than 100 students associated with the school’s programs for HuskerVision, Creative and Emerging Media, the Huskers Radio Network, and Athletic Photography.)
Thanks to the scalability of packet-based signal delivery (IP), all the school’s venues, as well as the various video scoreboards, can now be fed the highest quality signals from the same centralized place over a fiber optic network. The control rooms can be set up to work in tandem for larger events or used separately as required for smaller functions.
“It was important to deploy a scalable production system that could support all of the events that people want us to do and make it far easier to troubleshoot remotely, allowing us to reliably send signals from one end of campus to another,” Hill said. “And it’s mainly run by students, which speaks to the ease of use of the various systems in place.”
Mixed Format Architecture
Once system design plans were finalized, BeckTV was brought in to make it all work. Brock Raum, senior engineer for BeckTV who was a HuskerVision team member when he attended the school, led the integration team that handled the equipment and systems buildout.
“They wanted a complete UHD HDR workflow, but the budget didn't really allow for it,” Raum said. “But we still wanted to give them a UHD HDR workflow, so we incorporated some legacy baseband and other favored components. It's a true mixed format architecture.
There's a large amount of 12G and 3G 1080p content interacting across the entire plant, which necessitated a handful of 12G endpoints and 3G endpoints. "Planning with Garret and his team in advance where those endpoints were, and what they needed, really helped us focus in on a system design that fit within their budget, but still gave them the features that they really wanted for their plant today and for the long term," Raum added.
HuskerVision had a large amount of legacy equipment that it still wanted to use, things that didn't necessarily need to be 12G UHD, such as encoders, decoders, and native 1080p Ross Video graphics machines. As a result, being able to intermix formats seamlessly was a big priority for them.
“We tried to streamline the configurations and the workflows as much as possible,” Raum said. “So, we sat down with Garrett, Kirk Hartman [assistant athletic director] and Scott Guthrie [former chief engineer], and we talked about what needed to be done."
The solution was anchored by a Grass Valley K-Frame SXP IP switcher with a Kayenne 4 ME panel, because it can accept either 3G or 12G. "When you're running 12 UHD on that switcher, you can accept either format," Raum explained. "Then on the edges, we just had to figure out, OK, can this device natively do 12G? Can it natively do 1080p? And once we put that puzzle together, we built out workflows that they don't really have to think about in their day-to-day operations.”
Lawo’s .edge platform is used both as a high‑density gateway and full IP processing node. Multiple .edge frames provide 3G‑SDI and 12G‑SDI ingest, while native ST 2110 connectivity and 100 Gbps interfaces feed the production fabric.
Single-Threaded Core
The control rooms were completed by August of 2025, when students and some professional crew began training on the new equipment. At the core of the IP architecture is a Cisco 9364 IP switch with 64 ports (400 Gb capacity). That can scale to more than 2,133x2,133 ports, even at 12G.
“Even if they dropped all the 1080p and they said we're only going 12G, that's still a router that your facility isn't going to outgrow anytime soon,” Raum said. “So, it gives them a large amount of expandability in a small footprint. And that's one of the big selling points of ST 2110.”
Interestingly, the IP core production and distribution infrastructure is devised as a single path, with all signals riding on it, as opposed to a more complex (and expensive) dual-path design. This was a budgetary decision made to deploy a single-sided network, but HuskerVision can grow into a 2022-7 redundant network design if/when additional resiliency is desired.
“We call it ‘single threaded,’ and it was a cost efficiency thing, as we were trying to balance the budget that we had,” Hill said. “We know the production trucks do it this way and it seems to work fine for them. And so far, the fact that it's single threaded has not been a problem."
Redundancy to protect against system failures is managed using “lots of spare parts” and swapping out COTS servers when necessary. Because they can have any signal go anywhere, it’s never been easier to work around a hardware failure. It can be managed automatically or manual via Lawo’s Virtual Studio Manager (VSM) platform, used to control all production devices, their parameters, and functionalities from a single user interface.
Communication Is Key
As for the challenges of upgrading an entire network of venues to bi-directional IP operations, Hill said the hardest part might be getting the networking and all the devices on it to communicate correctly. “I've been dealing with networking for quite a few years now, but it's just a little bit different with ST 2110 because it's only multicast,” he offered. “How do you set up a network that is different than your regular corporate, core-access/edge or core-aggregate-access/edge model if you've only got devices and VLANs at the edge? Whereas here we’re doing routing between switch ports. We’re not switching, we’re routing through an entire fabric. So that was new to me.”
Another key to the success of the HuskerVision IP model is the use of software-defined HOME applications from Lawo. HOME is a cloud-native, browser-based management platform designed to connect, manage, and secure IP-based media infrastructures. HuskerVision is using several of the apps, including those for the control rooms’ multiviewers, signal conversion, color correction, and downstream keying.
The benefit of the HOME apps is that they can be turned on or off at will, saving cost and resources. Also, as a customer of Lawo, HuskerVision has access to what Lawo calls “flex credits” as part of the agreed upon software license subscription. “These credits can be applied to any of the HOME apps,” said Kevin Broce, key accounts manager at Lawo. “[HuskerVision] has a pretty hefty number of credits available on their system, which allows them to turn on every function in our portfolio. That includes access to any solution we offer now and anything we release in the future."
The flex credits can be scaled out to hardware functions like frame syncs on gateways. In the HuskerVision infrastructure, there are Lawo edge video gateways in the venues, control rooms, and truck docks. Basically, they have lots of I/O everywhere and can use those flex credits that turn on any HOME app for use anywhere on the network. The system’s ability to present SDI inputs as network “proxies” gives HuskerVision high scalability with minimal bandwidth overhead.
This software license model also allows HuskerVision to turn on additional gateway functionality, so it doesn't have to buy perpetual licenses for every one of these gateways, because they're not using them all at the same time. Rather than enabling that functionality in every location and sitting on it, maybe using it only 5% of the time, HuskerVision uses the credits to its advantage.
Audio Education
The HuskerVision hub facility is also complemented with three Lawo mc²56 audio consoles, a dedicated console for studio A, plus consoles in studio B studio C (for streaming). The layout was adopted specifically to support the school’s teaching efforts. Also included are Lawo A__stage 64 and A__mic 8 interfaces, as well as HOME Management for routing and orchestration.
“They’ve decided to dedicate these consoles to specific purposes so that the kids ultimately get experience with dedicated hardware and dedicated workflows,” said Broce. He added that while Lawo’s audio solution includes virtual mix interfaces (MXGUI), they also added tactile, physical MC2 console surfaces in the control rooms.
“A great thing about our audio solution, at the push of a VSM button, you can completely change the console use case and workflow,” he explained. “You can remotely access the console from anywhere. Say a new student is struggling with something on the desk; Garrett can log in remotely from his office or the stadium and troubleshoot the issue with access to every parameter and function via MXGUI.”
HuskerVision's new IP infrastructure serves two key purposes: It helps the department deliver higher-quality content for fans, educators, and students, while offering students hands-on experience with top-tier equipment, IT networking, and scalable IP-based workflows. The result is a campus‑wide media fabric capable of handling simultaneous shows from centralized control rooms.
“We're definitely growing into the system and learning some things every day, but by and large it's been working great,” said Hill. “We now have the capability to do whatever the school’s athletic department throws at us and are confident the system will perform as designed. The use of IP infrastructures for college sports production is increasing every day, and we now can clearly see why."
For more AVoIP insights, download your free copy of the SCN Integration Guide to AVoIP.
