How Carbonite HyperMax gives sports broadcasters a shared resource pool

The production infrastructure behind sports broadcasting is caught between two realities. The demand for more content keeps growing, with more games, platforms, simultaneous productions, and output feeds per event. But the infrastructure model underneath it all remains rooted in fixed, single-purpose hardware that can’t flex between a packed Saturday and a quiet Tuesday.

The result is an industry that either over-provisions for peak demand and accepts the idle capacity, or under-provisions and scrambles when the schedule gets heavy. Neither option is ideal in the face of rapidly changing media rights and disrupted revenue streams due to shifting consumer habits. Production budgets need to cover more output than ever before, creating a gap between capability and demand.

Ross Video built Carbonite HyperMax to end that trade-off. Instead of locking production switching capacity to individual trucks or control rooms, HyperMax enables centralized control and license configuration across equipped frames. This allows content creators to make better use of existing infrastructure.

Let’s use a familiar scenario for sports broadcasting crews that can cause capacity and budgeting headaches.

Traditional production switchers are typically configured around the requirements of a specific truck or control room. A four M/E switcher may be appropriate for a regional sports production, while a smaller streaming game may use only part of that capacity. Many systems can be expanded with additional I/O and M/E resources when space remains in the frame, but once that capacity is exhausted, the options become a larger switcher, a second frame, or a significant hardware upgrade.

Compound this decision across the entire studio, and you have a situation where sports broadcasters are forced to overinvest in hardware to cover peak events that are the exception in their schedules rather than the norm.

Carbonite HyperMax works differently.

Built on Ross Video’s Ultrix routing platform, it’s a hyperconverged production system that combines switching and routing in a single frame. Processing is delivered by modular SDPE blades, each configurable as a MaxME, MaxMini, or MaxScene through software licensing. Each HyperMax instance supports up to eight SDPE blades within its FR12 frame. Larger frames, such as the new Ultrix FR30, can accommodate multiple HyperMax instances, increasing the total available blade capacity. Configurations can change between productions without touching the hardware.

Single-system flexibility is useful. But the bigger idea—announced at NAB 2026—is the HyperMax Resource Pool.

Nigel Spratling, Ross Video’s VP of Production Switchers, described the problems that the Resource Pool solves like this:

The Resource Pool provides a centralized management of licenses and resources across control rooms and OB trucks. Each production can be configured with the licenses and processing capacity available in equipped frames. When demand drops, those resources become available for whatever’s next on the schedule. Ross Platform Manager handles the orchestration, allocating capabilities and licenses across the pool based on the production schedule.

Ross Production Services’ new HyperMax 1 truck demonstrates how the Resource Pool architecture works in a real-world setting. It’s a 48-foot unit built around a Carbonite HyperMax 4 M/E switcher with Ultrix routers, five Rio Replay panels, four XPression graphics engines, two PIERO AR graphics servers, and support for up to 16 cameras. It’s a fully equipped Tier 1 mobile unit.

What makes it more than a well-equipped truck is its role in the Resource Pool. As Spratling explained at NAB 2026, the OB truck can function as a node in the shared pool, operating as the controller, the controlled, or both from a single TouchDrive panel.

A truck on-site at a venue can draw additional processing from a centralized facility. A centralized hub can access the truck’s resources. Combined with REMI workflows, this creates a hybrid production model that bridges traditional OB and at-home production in a way that fixed-configuration trucks never could.

The Resource Pool solves a different problem depending on where you sit in the production pyramid, but the underlying principle is the same. Fixed capacity that’s locked to a single production environment can’t help the production happening next door.

For a production hub serving multiple teams, the pain point is multi-game nights. Three simultaneous NBA and NHL games on a Saturday each need their own switching and replay resources. A shared management system lets operators assign the appropriate software licenses to equipped frames based on each production’s requirements.

Resources shift with the schedule rather than sitting locked in control rooms that can’t help each other.

• For a national network, the biggest challenge is seasonal scaling. The Resource Pool lets the same infrastructure support regular-season production and playoff demands without temporary buildouts or emergency rentals.
• For collegiate athletic departments, the challenge is multi-sport congestion. A shared pool at a centralized campus facility lets simultaneous productions draw the resources they need, without equipping every venue for peak capacity.
• For OB companies, the challenge is competing demand across trucks. HyperMax and the Resource Pool let operators manage and reconfigure resources in equipped trucks across the fleet, giving each unit greater flexibility with its installed hardware. The fleet becomes a system rather than a collection of self-contained units.

HyperMax and the Resource Pool are new. The Ross Video ecosystem they extend is not. At the top tier, Ross Video’s graphics and analysis tools run in the industry’s most demanding production environments.

PGA Tour Studios deployed XPression, Tessera, Voyager, and Lucid across its 165,000-square-foot centralized facility in Ponte Vedra Beach. NBC Sports Regional Networks runs a hub-and-spoke XPression and PIERO deployment across San Francisco, Boston, and Philadelphia with a flexible model that scales between peak and regular programming. Rogers Sportsnet powers its NHL studio broadcasts with XPression Tessera, driving real-time graphics across 22 LED displays including a 50-foot curved floor-to-ceiling wall.

At the collegiate level, Carbonite switchers and XPression graphics are the standard production package across thousands of users producing for ESPN+ and conference networks. ESPN pushes standardized XPression graphics templates from a project server in Bristol to schools across the country. The University of Texas built its new SEC broadcast facility around Ultrix and Ultrix Acuity switching with XPression graphics, covering six-plus venues from four control rooms.

HyperMax itself has sold at twice the rate Ross Video anticipated since its introduction at NAB 2025. Ross Production Services now operates ten trucks and produces more than 500 events annually across 30+ platforms in 48 states and internationally, with HyperMax 1 as the flagship unit leading the next generation of that fleet.