Fox Sports Chairman/CEO David Hill entertained and informed an IBC crowd attending a panel on the future of sports. The good news? He’s a believer in 3D, albeit one who believes it will happen only if broadcasters can see a financial benefit (unlike, he adds, the move to HD in which only consumer-electronics manufacturers benefited financially). The bad news? It might be only an interim step to the REAL future!

SportsNet New York is the television home of the New York Mets, and, although this season is not ideal from a players’ perspective, the broadcaster never changed its game plan. The regional sports network covers every game in HD, using top-of-the-line equipment, and even had a chance to have some fun with this year’s broadcasts, the first from brand-new Citi Field.

Broadcast partners do not often share production facilities, but in the cramped quarters of the U.S. Open production compound, unusual accommodations are made daily. F&F Productions outfitted its GTX15 production unit to accommodate both CBS Sports and ESPN’s coverage of the event – despite the networks using different graphics, different philosophies, and different crews.

The Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame, the only Hall of Fame honoring both those in front of and behind the camera who have made sports broadcasting a cultural force, has announced its 2009 inductee class. This year’s class of legends includes sportscasters Dick Enberg and Keith Jackson, former PGA Tour Commissioner Deane Beman, network TV executives Barry Frank and Chuck Howard, and technical innovators Garrett Brown, Steve Laxton, and John Porter.

Grass Valley SVP Jeff Rosica wasted no time addressing the company’s sale during the Grass Valley IBC press event. Grass Valley appears to be close to being sold, and the company is in exclusive negotiations with a single buyer. Who it is remains to be seen (there have been some rumors online), but it does appear that a deal will be finalized sooner rather than later.

SVG Editorial Director Ken Kerschbaumer has the floor covered at IBC in Amsterdam, posting all the latest news, deals, and releases in SVG’s IBC Sports Technology Blog. For all the latest news and notes from the biggest show across the pond, keep up with SVG’s IBC blog coverage by clicking through to the blog: http://sportsvideo.org/main/ibc2009/.

On the court at the U.S. Open, player challenges have now become as common as the close calls that invite them. Thanks to the Chase Review system, which utilizes Hawk-Eye technology, those challenges are quickly resolved, match after match. Just how does the review system work, and work so quickly? The secret lies in the upper broadcast booth at Arthur Ashe stadium, where the main Hawk-Eye system is located.

For fans not lucky enough to get a seat at the U.S. Open, Jack Stocker’s job is to transform their living rooms into the closest possible approximation to Arthur Ashe Stadium. Stocker is CBS Sports’ lead audio mixer and he is charged with bringing the sounds of the court to fans across the country.

Jerry Gepner, who joined Vitec Group as CTO in 2005 and has been serving as interim president for Bexel Broadcast Services, has been named Divisional CEO for the Vitec Services Division.

L’Opera Broadcast Video Service selected Harris Broadcas to provide equipment for its brand-new HD OB (Outside Broadcast) van, “OB 5 HD.” The latest addition to the L’Opera fleet, “OB 5 HD” will be parked in the outside broadcast area at IBC2009 as part of a busy European demonstration tour.

Every year, the first Saturday of the U.S. Open requires a changeover as CBS goes off the air after the afternoon session and the cable partner du jour comes on air for the evening matches. Every year, there is a full hour built into the schedule to complete the changeover. And every year, that hour is cut down into a smaller and smaller window as matches consistently take longer than their scheduled time.

Harris Corporation is prepared to provide complete on-site service and support to broadcasters during the 2010 Winter Games taking place in February in Vancouver. The company has established local on-site support operations and special service package options, which require pre-registration by December 1, 2009, so that Harris can ensure the right inventory is on-hand and available throughout the event.

PLAZAMEDIA, Germany’s largest producer of sports television, chose a range of Harris broadcast solutions to support a new high-definition (HD) IPTV service, which is offering live coverage of Germany’s 2009/2010 Bundesliga (national football league) season. PLAZAMEDIA selected Harris routing, branding and signal processing technology — including 24 of the award-winning X85™ multiple application video and audio processors — for the project.

Body packs, those critical fulcrums between the lavaliere microphone and the wireless receiver, are standard issue throughout broadcast-sports infrastructure. They’re ubiquitous but continuously evolving, following the well-trod technology path of smaller, faster, better, and (to some extent) cheaper.

EditShare has acquired Geevs broadcast video servers and the Lightworks nonlinear editing platform. This is a complementary offering to EditShare’s Complete Collaboration product line which includes multi-channel ingest, shared production storage and archiving solutions. The acquisition of Geevs and Lightworks technology will provide EditShare customers with expanded options for building fully integrated, tapeless workflows.

The Grass Valley MediaFUSE automated content repurposing platform has several new and significant features designed to make the process of repurposing video and textual content for the Internet and mobile broadcasting even faster and more efficient than before.

Linear Acoustic is introducing the CARBON Hybrid Metadata Loudness Controller at IBC 2009 (Stand 8.D29). Loudness control and audio encoding are combined by a patent-pending hybrid process that allows infinitely variable adjustment between permanent and reversible control of source audio loudness and dynamic range. Capable of working with any audio codec that supports metadata, the premier version of Linear Acoustic CARBON maximizes the effectiveness of metadata within the Dolby Digital (AC-3) system.

Linear Acoustic is demonstrating one of the first implementations of Dolby Pulse (Dolby’s implementation of HE AAC) audio coding system at IBC 2009 (Stand 8.D29). The AERO.air Transmission Loudness Manager is currently available with Dolby Digital and Dolby Digital Plus encoding and has now been expanded to include the new Dolby Pulse.

Virgin Media, a leading entertainment and communications company in the UK, has chosen Cisco to support its IPTV distribution platform and help upgrade its legacy digital TV infrastructure.

Arqiva has deployed revolutionary new MPEG-2 video compression to update its UK digital terrestrial (DTT) transmission infrastructure and TANDBERG Television was awarded the contract after extensive technical evaluation and competitive tender. Crucial to the deal is the recently announced TANDBERG EN8100 high-density MPEG-2 broadcast encoder.

Brussels-based Studio L’Equipe, one of Belgium’s leading post production facilities have opened a second facility in nearby Bierges. As part of the expansion Studio L’Equipe have relocated their Euphonix System 5 digital audio mixing system to the new facility and carried out significant console upgrades to satisfy even the most demanding audio post projects.

Intelsat signed a contract with GlobeCast, a leading content management and delivery company, for occasional-use (OU) capacity that spans Intelsat’s entire satellite fleet. The multi-year contract offers GlobeCast increased satellite transmissions infrastructure to fulfill its customer needs for distribution of live sports, breaking news and special events.

MultiDyne Video & Fiber Optic Systems is introducing the openGear compatible HD-4400 four-channel fiber optic transport system at IBC 2009 (Stand 2.A54). This high density, multirate, 3G HD-SDI SMPTE fiber optic transport system with a 4×4 matrix on both the transmitter and receiver is one of the first products MultiDyne has designed as part of its participation in the openGear terminal equipment platform group.

Miranda Technologies has enhanced its Densite IRD-3811 integrated receiver/decoder by adding support for DVB-S and DVB-S2 demodulation plus DVB-CA conditional access. The IRD-3811 enables DBS, cable and IPTV operators to demodulate satellite signals from program originators, and also allows broadcasters to receive digital terrestrial feeds, as well as network and remote feeds. It provides both MPEG-2 and H.264 video decoding, and supports Dolby Digital (AC-3). The IRD-3811 also provides advanced HD/SD video and multi-channel audio processing in an ultra-compact form factor, with 10 IRDs per 3RU frame.

The Sports Video Group is pleased to welcome our newest sponsor, mPOINT. mPOINT provides on-demand, cloud-based video services supported and extended by a range of cost-effective professional services that maximize the value of video investments.

The Sports Video Group is pleased to announce that Audio-Technica has renewed its corporate sponsorship. Audio-Technica is an innovator in transducer technology, known for the design and manufacture of microphones, wireless microphones, headphones, mixers, and electronics for the audio industry.

The Kansas Speedway area has emerged as the new choice for a long-sought Wizards soccer stadium in a sweeping proposal that would include at least 4,000 new Cerner Corp. jobs. The developer working for OnGoal LLC, the owner of the Kansas City Wizards, has prepared a stadium plan for a site owned by Nebraska Furniture Mart in Kansas City, KS. The developer is asking state and county officials to use revenues from the existing sales-tax revenue bonds, also known as STAR bonds, issued for the Village West retail district to help finance the project. To sweeten its proposal, OnGoal, whose ownership group includes Neal Patterson and Cliff Illig, co-founders of Cerner, has included a 600,000-sq.-ft. office project that Wyandotte County officials confirmed would house new Cerner employees…

Thursday night’s NFL season premier, a Steelers 13-10 overtime win over the Titans on NBC Sports, was the highest-rated NFL Kickoff in seven years. The game also delivered the best overnight sports rating since Super Bowl XLIII, the best overnight primetime rating since the American Idol finale, and dominated the other networks, according Nielsen.

EVS announced that its new MulticamLSM 10 software package now offers full 3D-HD loop recordings, playbacks, slow-motion replays, instant editing, and live clipping functions, making all existing capabilities of the MulticamLSM software available for any type of 3D-HD production.

Twofour Digital will serve as ViewCast’s consulting systems-integrator partner in Europe and India, supporting the company’s resellers with systems-integration and software-development solutions for its Osprey video-capture cards and Niagara encoding appliances, under terms of an agreement announced Thursday.

Inlet Technologies is using IBC2009 at the RAI Centre in Amsterdam to unveil the integration of its Segmenter software to allow iPhone-ready streams to be automatically created, as well as automated video-on-demand asset creation and support for Microsoft’s PlayReady digital-rights-management technology.

Salzbrenner Stagetec Mediagroup will debut its Crescendo mixing console, as well as enhanced Dolby E capabilities for its Nexus audio router, at IBC2009 at the RAI Centre in Amsterdam.

Users of the new versions of Avid’s NewsCutter, Media Composer, and Symphony editing systems now have direct access to and compatibility with HD-video footage and metadata created using Ikegami’s GFCam HDS-V10 tapeless Flash-memory camcorder, the two companies announced.

T-VIPS will debut its TVG450 Video Gateway next generation JPEG2000-based video-transport solution at IBC2009 at the RAI Centre in Amsterdam, saying that the new solution complements the existing T-VIPS Video Gateway family and is integrated with T-VIPS Connect, the company’s control and monitoring solution.

Two-time Olympic Games figure-skating medalist Nancy Kerrigan will provide exclusive video reports from the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, British Columbia, for STATS and StarGames.

Telecast Fiber Systems made multiple announcements this week at IBC2009 in Amsterdam. First on the slate is the new TeleCube Modular Media Interface (MMI) family of 3G transmitter and receiver modules. Developed specifically for OEM applications, the TeleCube MMI system offers broadcasters a flexible, cost-effective I/O solution for distribution of HD-SDI signals via fiber optics as well as copper cable.

Front Porch Digital will add user-interface internationalization, including Unicode support, to its SAMMA family of products targeting media migration from videotape to digital storage, and the company will demonstrate the enhanced SAMMA solutions at IBC2009 at the RAI Centre in Amsterdam.

Solid State Logic will demonstrate a new version of its Gravity Asset Browser Web client powered by Microsoft Silverlight at Microsoft’s Topaz Lounge exhibit area at IBC2009 at the RAI Centre in Amsterdam.

In preparation for the 2010 launch of Sky News HD, Sky News will purchase 11 HyperX3 graphics systems, as well as a CAMIO Cluster Server and OMS (Order Management System), from Chyron.

GlobeCast invested more than €2million on HD upgrades for its two sites in the United Kingdom as a result of its expanded contract to provide HD coverage of the UEFA Champions League and HD and standard-definition coverage of the UEFA Europa League to non-European rights holders.

T-VIPS announced at IBC2009 at the RAI Centre in Amsterdam that Arqiva accelerated the rollout of its T-VIPS CP515 SI Manager solution and that it supplied RAI Way with advanced digital-terrestrial-television video-processing solutions for the Italian operator’s DVB-T service.

Audio-Technica announced the debut of the AT4080 and AT4081 bidirectional active-ribbon microphones; the AT4050ST stereo condenser microphone; the AT4047MP multipattern condenser microphone; and the BPHS1 broadcast stereo headset.

Nucomm, part of The Vitec Group’s RF Extreme business unit, will feature its ProQ Digital IFB (Interruptible Feedback) System at IBC2009 at the RAI Centre in Amsterdam Sept. 11-15, and the provider of digital and analog microwave systems to international broadcast, government, and military markets says the ProQ system is ideal to provide a low-latency IFB audio path to electronic-newsgathering/OB users, and it provides additional features such as field-tally indication and truck remote controls.

Avid introduced new versions of its Media Composer (4.0), Symphony (4.0), NewsCutter (8.0) professional editing software, and Interplay (2.0) production-asset-management system at IBC2009 at the RAI Centre in Amsterdam.

Grass Valley will use ATTO Technology’s Xtend SAN iSCSI Initiator for Mac OS X to provide iSCSI storage connectivity for Apple Final Cut Studio systems that use Grass Valley’s Connect plug-in for its K2 Media Servers.

Bassmaster.com debuts its newly redesigned site, which features a revamped design and navigation interface, as well as updated multimedia platforms including an expanded video player with a richer 16:9 screen.

Orca Interactive, SoftAtHome, and Viaccess will demonstrate their end-to-end 3D TV solution—which enables service providers to accelerate time to market and deliver a new TV offering with a 3D HD user interface on broadcast, Internet-protocol-TV, or hybrid networks—at IBC2009 at the RAI Centre in Amsterdam.

Yankees Entertainment & Sports Network will turn its focus to the gridiron, debuting a live simulcast of radio station WFAN’s Sunday-morning National Football League show, Football Sunday with Mike Francesa, Sunday from 9 a.m.-noon ET.

Anton/Bauer will use IBC2009 at the RAI Centre in Amsterdam to debut its Tandem 150 Modular Power System, which it calls the smallest and lightest charger and on-camera power-supply package available on the market.

It's been less than a year since we first entered Panasonic's demo trailer, the main difference at CEDIA this year was the addition of a trailer for James Cameron's Avatar. We were lucky enough to get an early look at the footage shown, while it shared much with the trailer released a few weeks ago, you haven't seen the Terminator and Titanic director's latest effort unless you've seen it in 3D. Check after the break for the rest of our thoughts on the 3D demo, and what the future has to hold for thid display tech in the home.