JOSH MIELY, HOST: The media landscape doesn’t stand still, nor does the business behind it. Welcome to Changing Frequencies, a podcast from NAB show. Each episode explores how media, entertainment and storytelling are evolving, from broadcast to streaming content creators to the cloud and sports to AI, spotlighting the people who are defining what’s next. I’m Josh Miely. For many of today, we’re looking at live sports, not from the highlight reel, but from the infrastructure that makes those highlights possible.

Before we begin, this episode is proudly sponsored by Lumen and Vyvx Solutions, a leader in managed broadcast transport and connectivity for live sports and media production.

We’ll explore the broader industry implications, but it’s important to acknowledge that Vyvx plays a major role in powering many of the live events viewers take for granted. Now, live sports production has changed dramatically in the last few years. Distributed crews, centralized production hubs, cloud graphics, IP transport, low latency streaming. As sports betting and second screen interactivity, as well as global streaming, scale up the tolerance for delay, or even worse, failure keeps getting smaller.

So what does it mean for the infrastructure layer? I’m joined today by Rick Gibson, vice president and general manager of Vyvx Solutions at Lumen. Rick leads a global team responsible for managed broadcast transport, fiber, IP, video and satellite connectivity that supports live sports production around the world. Rick, it is great to have you. Welcome to the NAB show podcast, my friend.

RICK GIBSEN: Thanks, Josh. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

MIELY: Oh, absolutely. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation all week, once we had it booked. And here’s where I want to start. Live sports used to mean trucks and satellites. I’m thinking like, you know, back in the John Madden/Pat Summerall days. But today means IP networks and dispersed teams. In your view, what is fundamentally changed in how live sports are produced over, let’s just say, the last five years.

GIBSEN: Oh, my. You know, it’s changed so much. And it’s, and it continues to grow, year over year. Requirements grow, solutions change and modify. You know, really connectivity is, it’s really no longer just how you deliver the show. You know, years past, you may have, you know, a one gig circuit, you know, into a stadium, you know, that you’re delivering, you know, a handful of video feeds, maybe a little bit of data.

But now it’s, you’re talking, you know, hundreds of gigs worth of traffic that are actually traversing the, you know, the overall platform and delivering for the customers. You know, and it’s not only capacity, it’s really modernizing, you know, how broadcasting is actually done now. I mean, you have to, embracing cloud along with data-driven analytics powering software-defined, intelligent workflows.

There’s just a multitude of changes that we’ve seen, you know, over the last five years. And like I said earlier, it just continues to grow and grow.

MIELY: And I assume that it will continue that growth spurt over the next five years and five years after that and after that. So at what point does latency stop being a technical issue and become more of a business issue, especially with the streaming you mentioned and second screens and sports betting and everything else we’ve got now within our live sports broadcasts.

GIBSEN: You know, with fan engagement, with all the data that we’re pulling together and that we’re, you know, that we’re transmitting across, you’ve got consumers that are, they’re watching the game on one, pulling up analytics on a second screen and, you know, doing both maybe, sometimes three screens. But to the point of latency, it becomes a business decision—or I shouldn’t say business decision—becomes a business issue whenever, you know, customers are then seeing, you know, the content is getting to one location, you know, a lot quicker than another location.

We’ve seen in some markets, you know, where you have dual broadcasters, you’ll even see where consumers will actually move because they can hear their neighbor cheering, you know, before they’re cheering. So it’s definitely getting the content to the consumer’s eyes is paramount. And then along with, you know, the growth of online betting, you’ve got to imagine that they will need, you know, the quickest, most reliable transmission that is available.

MIELY: Absolutely. It blows my mind to just think of some of the deep-down prop bets they can have and the fact that the in-game betting has things that will go spontaneously with what is happening with the game. It’s really quite amazing. And to your point earlier, you know, as a Green Bay Packers fan, when I watch my Packers, but also, you know, want to listen to the local commentators, boy, sometimes matching up those times, it’s really tricky. And you got to be patient. And thankfully I understand why, but I don’t think the general public does. Would you kind of agree?

GIBSEN: I do, I do. It’s, you know, whenever you look at the overall quality in how, you know, you’ve got your embedded audio along with the video, and how that’s how that’s brought out, you know, from an aggregation standpoint and then, you know, through post-production and delivered. It becomes, you know, the priority to ensure that it’s getting to the consumer’s eyes as quick as possible.

MIELY: Absolutely. And listen, I know, you know, Lumen Stadium out in Seattle, you guys won the Super Bowl. I’m allowed to drop a little bit of a Green Bay Packers on this conversation.

GIBSEN: There you go.

MIELY: I want to jump up now to actual production. You know, we’re seeing more centralized production hubs. We’re seeing more remote crews. How does the connectivity that’s out there enable or I guess maybe sometimes even possibly constrain those that are doing remote production in the strategies they put together for it.

GIBSEN: Oh, that’s I mean, that’s a great question. You look at just the size of some of these events, you know. You look at the, you know, you look at the big game that we, you know, that we do every February. The capacity required for just that game. You know, of course, I’ve been doing this a few years.

I can remember, you know, providing the transmissions for that, you know, basically below one gig. And now we’re doing that show anywhere — five, 600 gig worth of traffic, out of, you know, and that’s from the stadium. So there’s, so you look at that, you know, from that perspective, and you have all these remote, all the remote production, and even it’s moving the content to production.

So you’re using just this vast amount of, it’s both video and data that, you know, for analytics for, you know, for everything that is actually need for, needed for the broadcast. So that kind of gives a view in into how it enables. But then on the reverse side, you know, the area of constraint, you know, you have some locations where it’s hard to get that amount of capacity, that amount of content. So you have to be more creative.

You know, you, either you’re using some dedicated connectivity, some internet direct connectivity. So there’s, you could be doing anything from, you know, multiple 20-meg, you know, internet services to, you know, maybe a gig or a little bit more of a gig of traffic. You know, a lot of that you see primarily, maybe in college sports and maybe some of the tier two, tier three locations.

Not an issue in the pro venues. You know, the pro venues are all built out, you know, with tons of capacity. So there’s, you know, but it really just kind of depends on the show that’s being produced and the requirements, you know, getting that content back out to production or post-production.

MIELY: So then that was going to be my follow-up when you brought up venues is, you know, as we look at sports venues that are continually getting updated, you know, if they’re building a new stadium in Cleveland, that’s not to say that the current stadium, they’re not updating all the tech capabilities within on a year-to-year basis. Correct?

GIBSEN: Absolutely, absolutely. We actually, Lumen will go through, we do a capacity and services evaluation. You know, it’s not, you know, when you look at the Vyvx end of, our Vyvx’s business within Lumen, it’s not just about capacity because it is service. Because you want to, you know, whenever the broadcasters pull up and plug in, they need a myriad of solutions, right? They need video. They need internet. They need private line. They, you know, they need voice. They need, and just, you know, a suite of services. And so what we have to do is look at, how do we best serve everyone that’s in there from the broadcast or the league? And then any other organizations that, you know, need to actually transmit from the facility.

So review it. Augment. And it’s, I almost, I kind of refer to it as, you know, painting the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s like, you know, whenever you get done, you go back to the beginning and start all over again. So…

MIELY: Oh, wow. So it’s, like, it’s just like a continuous construction project.

GIBSEN: It is.

MIELY: But again, it’s the speed of our technologies right now. Correct?

GIBSEN: Exactly.

MIELY: So I think we probably have started covering this, but I wanna make sure we hit it fully. We think about streaming and how it’s more central to how sports are distributed now. Scale and reliability. How do they change compared to the traditional broadcast models we had that you and I certainly grew up with?

GIBSEN: You know, on the, so if we look at streaming, we look at it, you know, from two lenses, right? From, because you have, you know, basically the traditional content aggregation, where you’re pulling the content in from the venues, you’re doing your production, you’re doing your streaming encoding and then off to the consumers. You know, if you look at from the aggregation standpoint, very, very similar to, you know, traditional, you know, to the traditional broadcast model. Once you get to the distribution side, that is where, you know, it changes dramatically. You know, and you’re going from, you know, delivering to, you know, say specific points to multiple, multiple points.

And so you have to look at the overall network in areas of IP peering, you know, the interconnectivity between different regions, localization for those specific regions and how that’s actually delivered. So it’s a, sometimes it’s, even for large events, it can actually even be a traffic engineering effort to ensure that you have, you know, all the content delivered, you know, to those different peering points, you know, as needed.

But, yeah, it definitely changes the way that we have to actually look at the network. You know, you go from, you know, either delivering, you know, with like say multiple waves to satellite to, now you’re delivering to, again, multiple peer points all across an IP network.

MIELY: So go a little bit deeper in that like, you know, we think about let’s say the World Cup’s coming up, right? And 12 years ago, we had a World Cup and now we have one now. How many different places are we sending streams now as opposed to 12 years ago, which is when streaming literally was in its infancy. But it was, you know, we’d had Netflix for a while. We started to have where we were streaming sports. What can you tell us about that?

GIBSEN: Well, you think about it too. You so you have, you know, if you go back 12 years, you would have, you know, I could remember when we would look at, you know, delivering 10 terabits of traffic was huge, you know. And now, you know, now you see some of these large events, you know, from a streaming perspective that exceed 50, 60 terabits in, you know, in their overall delivery.

So, there’s, you know, and then if you look at just infrastructure, you know, you’re handing off to, you know, years ago you would hand off to major markets, right? And then deliver from there. Now it’s from a cloud perspective. You’re hitting the network. It’s in the cloud. And then you’re dropping in all these different peering locations and getting directly to the consumers. So it’s quite the effort.

MIELY: Indeed. And look, another thing that we’ve talked about, but I want to come back to here right now is real-time data, because there’s a lot of that that goes on. The player tracking, analytics. We talked about three screens at one point in time. We talked about how wagering goes. I mean, it’s part of the product.

How does moving that data change what the infrastructure has to deliver? I mean, I think some of it goes into what we’ve already talked about, but I think there’s probably a bit more there.

GIBSEN: Yeah. I mean, it really, it bridges the production technology with fan experience. You know, I mean, you go back a few years ago, it’s primarily about making sure that we’re delivering, you know, video and audio. And someone may have been using, you know, some internet for back-office work. But no longer.

You know, we look at the vast majority of games that we deliver, the data traffic, is large, sometimes even larger than the video traffic. Now, granted, you know, there’s a lot embedded there. You know, you’ll have like, the broadcasters will, you know, will have embedded video files along with, you know, just some of the standard data and the analytics that there’ll be that they’ll be carrying.

But for the most part, you know, the appetite for that data is, it’s just growing. It’s almost, like it seems like it’s growing by the hour. You know, a lot of the requests we see is really specific to, you know, to the data that the both the broadcasters and the leagues are hungry for.

But for the most part, you know, the appetite for that data is, it’s just growing. It’s almost, like it seems like it’s growing by the hour. You know, a lot of the requests we see is really specific to, you know, to the data that the both the broadcasters and the leagues are hungry for.

MIELY: Excellent. And I know we’ve got a lot more leagues now. Like, we just start thinking about, we’re playing football in the spring. We’ve got, you know, a bunch of great rights deals that have happened in women’s sports. You know, obviously the venues are there and they’re going to be able to handle this. Do we have enough people and manpower and everything to continually cover all the sports that we have out there with this vast volume and everything that goes into every game that goes out?

GIBSEN: Yeah. You know, one of the areas that we really look towards, and of course, I think everyone does is automation, right? I mean, you know, there’s a lot of that that we’re looking to automate. I mean, you know, at the end of the day, we’re not going to be able to automate, you know, someone going and actually, you know, connecting up fiber, you know, at a venue and, and you know, and ensuring that, you know, that we have the right connectivity, the right camera feeds, things of that nature.

But, yeah, it’s an area where, you know, we constantly need more, you know, whether or not it’s more automation, more people, to actually provide those services.

MIELY: And then looking ahead five years, what do you think is going to separate leagues and media companies that get this right from those that don’t as we have this ever-expanding sports ecosystem?

GIBSEN: Wow. You know, that’s a great question. I would say, you know, the winners are going to be the ones who treat the connectivity as a strategic production layer and not a utility or just a connection point. Anymore, the underlying network and connectivity is a part of the production.

You know, we used to just call it “transmission.” But if you look at the way that production is done today and how production is moving more and more into the cloud, it’s the connectivity, the underlying network and the different services that get you to, you know, production, to post-production or even to the cloud. It’s even more important today than it ever was.

MIELY: And it’ll be even more important tomorrow than it is today, I am sure. Rick, this has been a blast. I’m going to get you out of here on this because I just have to know. I know you’ve been in so many of the, you know, the big trucks that have been at major sporting events and stuff. Tell me what your, one of your quickest “came to your mind right now” memories was of being in one of those trucks, what you covered. And by all means you had to say “big game” and not the actual name, that we understand.

GIBSEN: Yeah, absolutely. I think one that was probably near and dear to my heart was the game last year in New Orleans. You know, that was, there were so many things that were just surreal in the fact that you’re rolling these trucks into a broadcast compound with about eight inches of snow on the ground in New Orleans. And that was, that was unreal. But you know, the great thing was, you know, it was a massive undertaking.

Everything from the stadium itself and the entire setup at Bourbon Street, it was great to work with the broadcaster and the leagues, you know, on that show. It was just a real joy, one of the larger ones we’ve ever done. And we were just really, proud to be a part of it.

MIELY: Well, excellent. And tell everybody real quick, where can they find you when you are at NAB Show? Where can we find Lumen and Vyvx Solutions?

GIBSEN: We are in the West Hall. We have multiple locations around the sports theater. So, you know, once you enter, we’ll be right there next to the sports theater. And then we’ve got a couple of hospitality suites as well. So, we’re looking forward to seeing everyone.

MIELY: Rick, that’ll do it for today. Thank you for helping us look behind the curtain at what makes modern sports media possible.

Listen, infrastructure isn’t glamorous, but it’s foundational. And as sports media becomes more global, more interactive and more real-time, the backbone layer becomes strategic. These are exactly the kind of conversations we’ll be continuing at the 2026 NAB Show Sports Summit in Las Vegas, where industry leaders will tackle rights strategy, distribution models, data-driven engagement and the evolving economics of live sports.

I’m Josh Miely. Thanks for listening to “Changing Frequencies.” Subscribe and share and join us next time as we continue spotlighting the people shaping what’s next.