By Brian Galante
Special to RBR+TVBR
With the National Football League’s 2023-24 season underway, San Francisco 49ers fans have already enjoyed access to live Spanish-language game broadcasts. The en español play-by-play is thanks in part to Audio over IP technology, and a decision by the club to create a simple remote broadcast workflow for away games.
Making it happen for the team’s 49ers Studios are products from Barix. The technology allows engineers to plug in a Barix Instreamer device and return live gameday audio to studios in Mexico and in San Francisco.
The Instreamer is Barix’s “classic” Audio over IP encoder, and is used worldwide at origination points to encode and stream program audio to studios, transmitter sites and other end points where audio is received. In sports, the Instreamer is a common choice for remote broadcasting, where the producer or engineer needs only an Instreamer, a microphone, and a laptop to reliably move high-quality audio back to the studio.
Matias Godinez, the Spanish-language broadcast engineer and producer for the San Francisco 49ers, said that the football team first used the Instreamer to inject crowd noise into home broadcasts before deciding to take it on the road to capture entire away games. “We launched a Spanish-language content initiative in 2018 that has been successful, and our Spanish broadcast team now travels to away games,” he said. “We wanted something that was plug-and-play for road broadcasts. Once we establish an ethernet connection, the device is online and the audio can start to flow.”
Barix Exstreamer devices receive and decode the Instreamer-encoded streams back at Levi Stadium in San Francisco, where gameday audio is then delivered to various terrestrial, web, mobile and social media platforms. That includes the 49ers Spanish-language website and 33 radio stations in Mexico.
Godinez’s gameday configuration typically includes a small audio mixer to pull feeds from two headset mics, one referee mic and one crowd effective, ensuring a professional production for audiences as they enjoy listening to popular play-by-play announcer Jesus Zarate. “The devices ultimately bring the broadcast to listeners,” Godinez said. “As long as we have a stable internet connection with a base 5Mb/s bandwidth, the Instreamer consistently does its job, and the Exstreamer handles the rest back at our studios.”
