The broadcast compound at an event like the U.S. Open always gives us a great chance to spend a little more time with manufacturers who are on hand to support their equipment. Yesterday we had a chance to sit down with Rich Eilers, Canon Broadcast regional sales manager with CBS Sports long-time cameraman George Rothweiler.

Over the years the amount of energy required by Bexel to help build out U.S. Open facilities for CBS Sports and the USA Network has always been a challenging task but the addition of ESPN, and a quick ramp up schedule this summer made Bexel’s U.S. Open effort an all-hands-on deck experience. “Every office pitched in and we have racks here from every office,” says Joe Wire, Bexel Broadcast Services, vice president.

What does it take to broadcast the U.S. Open across the U.S. and around the globe? SVG Editorial Director Ken Kerschbaumer gives a quick master class overview of the U.S. Open broadcast compound, home to more than 900 broadcast professionals during the U.S. Open tennis tournament.

This week, ESPN will complete the first-ever network grand slam, broadcasting all four Tennis Grand Slam events in a single year. So what sets New York apart from Australia, Paris, and Wimbledon? Glitz and glamour.

Origin Digital’s John Leland is no stranger to the U.S. Open, having worked directly for the USTA on smaller projects for many years. However, this is his first year working with ESPN. The network contracted him, through Origin Digital, to provide technical management for ESPN’s ITV feeds – which essentially encompasses five separate shows being produced tat the same time, by two different producers.

Com Hem, Sweden’s largest cable-television operator, began rolling out a new interactive-TV and on-demand platform, which will reach some 500,000 subscribers by December.

This week, ESPN will complete the first-ever network grand slam, broadcasting all four Tennis Grand Slam events in a single year. So what sets New York apart from Australia, Paris, and Wimbledon? Glitz and glamour.

Front Porch Digital has developed a software-only player for MXF-wrapped JPEG 2000 video files. The player will be available at no cost and will operate in real time on a modern Windows computer with quad core processors. Deploying the player, users will be able to view, confirm, index, and catalog MXF-wrapped JPEG 2000 files without the need to resort to proxy files.

Join Adobe for a three-part seminar series that looks at how to create and stream engaging video on the web. Session 1, which begins at 11:00 a.m. PST on September 9, 2009, looks at expanding a higher-education audience through the use of video. Click here to register for the eSeminar Series.

Through four days, ESPN’s first year of broadcasting the U.S Open appears to be a slam of its own. The audience across the daily 10+-hour telecasts on ESPN is 13% larger than last year on USA, up from an average of 584,000 households to 658,000. ESPN2 is averaging a 0.6 US household rating for 43.5 hours (up from the 40 hours scheduled due to late-running matches), up 20% from a 0.5 for 2008 to date.

Eurosport will use Genesis Networks’ turnkey transmission solution for the delivery of its new Eurosport 2 HD sports channel to satellite operator TVN in Poland.

The National Hockey League’s Carolina Hurricanes installed a Ross Video Vision 3 QMD multidefinition production switcher at its home arena, the RBC Center in Raleigh, NC, and the switcher went live Sept. 3 to broadcast the college football season opener between the North Carolina State Wolfpack and the South Carolina Gamecocks.

John Malkin joined NFL Network as vice president, affiliate distribution, where he will be responsible for managing distribution and developing strategies to increase subscribers and subscriber revenue.

Tedy Bruschi, who retired last week after 13 years as a linebacker for the National Football League’s New England Patriots, joined ESPN’s group of NFL analysts and will work on ESPNBoston.com, NFL Live, SportsCenter, ESPN Radio, and other ESPN platforms, ESPN.com announced.

Bob Raissman of the New York Daily News to the New York Yankees announcers on Yankees Entertainment & Sports Network: Yes, we know, Derek Jeter is on the verge of breaking Lou Gehrig’s record for all-time hits as a Yankee. Enough already.

The ongoing carriage-agreement tussle between Comcast-owned Versus and satellite-TV operator DirecTV shocked many executives throughout the media industry, as they never expected the multichannel-TV carrier most associated with sports to drop a sports-themed network, reports John Ourand of SportsBusiness Journal.

The ESPN/ABC juggernaut is taking aim at the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, for which no host city has been named yet, reports Michael McCarthy of USA Today.

Miranda Technologies added integral de-embedding, shuffling, and re-embedding capabilities to its NVISION 8500 enterprise-class 3-gigabit-per-second HD/standard-definition routers.

Hall of Fame former Detroit Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell has an incurable tumor in the area of his bile duct, reports Bill McGraw of the Detroit Free Press.

The McEnroe brothers have shared a lot throughout their lives, but now John McEnroe and Patrick McEnroe are sharing the broadcast booth at the National Tennis Center in Flushing, NY, calling primetime U.S. Open matches for ESPN2, reports Richard Sandomir of The New York Times.

Major League Baseball and ESPN put out statements crediting themselves and each other for agreeing to “move the Sept. 27 Red Sox-Yankees game in New York from 8 p.m. to 1 p.m. so as not to conflict with Yom Kippur,” but they conveniently left out the fact that they were responsible for moving the game from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. in the first place, writes Phil Mushnick of the New York Post.

Andy Roddick vs. Roger Federer in a serving speed contest? How about Rafael Nadal vs. Andy Murray in a timed race to chase down drop shots? Those are the kind of matchups that could be featured at an All-Star showcase the head of the men's tennis tour is introducing next year as part of his efforts to help boost the sport's popularity.

If you're a fan of devices that play media from USB drives, such as the WD TV, you'll probably find the newest toy from Netgear interesting. The company announced Tuesday the newest Internet-connected set-top box in its Digital Entertainer product family, the Digital Entertainer Live (model EVA2000). The device is similar to the WD TV as it also has two USB ports and supports playback of a long list of digital media files, including DivX and Matroska MKV, a popular compressed format for high-definition movies.

When ESPN takes its Grand Slam coverage on the road to Australia, France, and England, the broadcaster does not have the production freedom that it gets to enjoy in America. For the other three Slams, the host broadcaster has full control of the cameras, close-ups, and replays, and tends to produce agnostic, one-size-fits-all coverage .

With one week of the U.S. Open in the books, several long nights have already been recorded, but none has been more epic than Saturday night, when Andy Roddick fell to John Isner in five sets. The match took nearly four hours to play — and that was before James Blake and Tommy Robredo took the court for the evening’s nightcap. The Roddick match took so long, in fact, that it fell out of the CBS broadcast window and Tennis Channel picked it up mid-match–- a boon for the newest cable partner on the block.

The Sports Video Group is pleased to announce that Polar Mobile has renewed its corporate sponsorship. A mobile publishing solutions provider, Polar is rapidly establishing itself as a leader in the mobile applications space, with clients such as TIME magazine, Sports Illustrated, Rogers Sportsnet, CNNMoney.com and BusinessWeek.

David Knise joined Sportvision as senior vice president and general manager of its motorsports business unit, where he will be responsible for overseeing all current motorsports products and partnerships, as well as strategic business-development initiatives, covering all media platforms including broadcast, interactive, iTV, wireless, and gaming.

Spain’s Antena 3 Television deployed Dalet Digital Media Systems’ Dalet Enterprise Edition at its main operation in Madrid and two regional locations on the Canary Islands: Las Palmas and Tenerife.

ESPN Deportes, ESPN’s 24-hour Spanish-language sports network, was added to the digital-basic tier for subscribers to Time Warner Cable in Texas following an agreement between Disney and ESPN Media Networks and Time Warner Cable, announced Tuesday.

Strategy & Technology, which produces interactive-TV playout systems and MHEG-5 middleware, will use IBC2009 at the RAI Centre in Amsterdam Sept. 11-15 to debut a module for integrating automation components from Video Design Software with its TSBroadcaster 2 object carousel system.

Microsoft is preparing several announcements for IBC2009 at the RAI Centre in Amsterdam Sept. 11-15 regarding its Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming.

Adobe is delighted to offer SVG Members special pricing on Adobe software. Members can now save 15% on all Adobe products in the North American online Adobe Store.