How to build the production layer for a world-class sports venue

1. From screens to experiences
2. The explosion of the venue canvas
3. Five production problems every venue faces
4. How production architecture is evolving
5. What venue leaders should consider next

Ross Video’s research has reached the same conclusion from different perspectives.

• The challenge with fan experience isn’t just about hardware—it’s about coordination.
• The sponsorship challenge isn’t just about inventory. It’s about the venue’s ability to create synchronized, memorable moments on demand.
• The scaling challenge isn’t just about staffing. It’s about whether the venue can expand its production for big events without overbuilding for the rest of the year.

When you connect these points, a clearer industry story appears. The competitive gap between venues is no longer simply about what fans can see. It’s defined by what the venue can produce and how widely it can deliver that experience.

This is one of the biggest changes in the industry. Ten years ago, most venues used a main show feed, a few sponsor spots, some replays, and basic graphics. That’s not enough anymore. Today, operators need to fill more screens, customize more outputs, respond faster, and coordinate content with lighting, audio, data, and show flow. And that’s before considering the growing demands of gameday broadcasts, with more channels, partners, and formats than ever before.

Our research on fan engagement is clear: the best venues treat game day like a live show. The most memorable moments happen when video, audio, lighting, and data work together in perfect sync, just seconds after a play. When that coordination is missing, the moment falls flat.

That matters because the venue is competing against a very different at-home experience than it was a decade ago. Deloitte’s stadium research notes that improved home viewing, better camera angles, and richer multimedia experiences have increased pressure on stadiums to deliver something the living room cannot match.

There are more displays, audiences are harder to impress, and the standard for a premium in-venue experience is higher than ever. This sets the stage for the five production issues defining modern venues today.

Fans at home get instant replays, multiple camera angles, richer graphics, and greater context than ever before. They also have convenience on their side, with cold drinks in the fridge a few steps away and every local restaurant in their pocket.

There’s no question that the live experience still offers atmosphere and emotion that home viewing cannot ever fully replace, but the information layer is often better at home, and fans know it. Deloitte’s more recent research makes the point directly: audiences want the in-person experience to have the same kinds of features they see while watching sports on streaming video.

Our own research backs this up. The “second screen” challenge is real. Fans at home are watching the game and using their phones for extra stats, context, and conversation. The venues that succeed are those that produce immersive, perfectly timed experiences hard to match anywhere else.

A bigger canvas means more content to make, route, tailor, trigger, and broadcast. It also means more complexity, especially when you need to sync everything with the outbound broadcast feed. As these demands grow, the production model has to change. When a venue has dozens or even hundreds of display endpoints and dozens of inputs, delivering a polished show means managing a full production ecosystem. SoFi Stadium’s 70,000 square feet of LED and Kia Center’s content zones are a good example of how many destinations a modern venue needs to coordinate at once.

New displays and integrations offer more advanced sponsorship opportunities. The move from placement-based sponsorship to moment-based activations depends on creating and coordinating more content, often for different audiences at the same time. Venues need to deliver branded moments, replays, data overlays, and virtual signage for multiple sponsors without making every request a custom engineering job.

A more revealing problem than screen count is system count. Many venues still operate with fragmented stacks. LED runs on one platform. Audio is managed elsewhere. Lighting has its own console. Many venues still have completely separate systems for in-house and broadcast production.

Each piece may work in isolation, but they do not always communicate with one another in a way that enables fast, coordinated responses to game actions. It also makes technology upgrades, additions, and expansions trickier.

Most venues are not designed around their biggest day. They are designed around the calendar they live with most often. But being available for every major event, whether that’s a must-win playoff game, a huge artist in town, or the World Cup final, is an opportunity that stadiums depend on more and more on to generate revenue and expand sponsorship.

That creates a mismatch when the event profile jumps. A typical home game is one thing. A championship, international series, a launch after a major renovation, or a must-not-fail tentpole event is something else. Marquee events demand deeper benches, more graphics capacity, more redundancy, more coordination, and a much lower tolerance for mistakes. Most venues are built and staffed for regular-season demands, not those peak moments.

This is more of an architectural issue than a staffing or technology problem. If a venue can’t quickly scale its control room, workflows, or content operations when needed, and connect with outside broadcast partners during big events, it will miss key opportunities and eventually hit a limit.

Many in the industry jump straight to IP, but the smarter approach is to focus on the transition first, and the transport second.

IP is real. It is growing. It is increasingly common in new venue projects because it delivers flexibility and room to scale. The Kia Center project is a great example of how ST 2110-based venue control rooms are becoming a bigger part of the market, especially for new stadium builds and big upgrades.

Without proper planning, in the short term a transition to IP infrastructure can add more operational headache, not less, because so many systems remain hybrid and so many vendor implementations still need sorting out. Planning has to happen earlier and in more detail than many teams expect, especially around bandwidth, multicast, signal flow, and system design.

That’s the right lens. Think about the production types and shows you want to support and whether your infrastructure helps or hinders that goal.

You can see that in the venue projects the industry keeps talking about, like Kia Center, or SoFi Stadium. They are repeatedly held up as benchmarks because of the scale of their production infrastructure and display canvases, but also because the workflows and control-room design behind it are now guiding how people think about venue design.

If you’re rethinking your venue’s production layer, a few principles matter most.

The real question is, what do you want to create when something big happens? The clearer you are about that—now and in the future—the easier it is to decide what kind of control, routing, data, and show logic you actually need.

The biggest moments in sports happen in seconds. If your venue needs a chain of manual steps to trigger replay, graphics, audio, lighting, and light projections you’ll lose speed and consistency when it matters most. The right moment ought to be one button push, not a relay race.

Bring IT and networking teams into the planning process early, especially for IP projects, where network topology needs to be mapped out before any new systems go live. The best way to ensure you overcome many of the network architecture issues that new deployments run into is to ensure the people that know the IT infrastructure and routers best are there from the beginning, not as an afterthought on site during commissioning.

Most venues don’t operate in a perfect world. Trucks will still arrive from broadcasters at the venue with all sorts of technology and signaling needs, all of which will need to be hooked up to the in-house production systems, some of it for the first time. Legacy systems are still used everywhere and SDI isn’t going anywhere. While ST2110 interop is much better than it was a few years ago, vendors still interpret standards differently, and those connections still need to be worked out. The best production setups recognize this and are built to work across a mixed environment.

This point is often overlooked, but it’s important. Our research and event services show that in complex venues, having a partner who can troubleshoot across multiple systems is just as valuable as the equipment itself.

As Lahey says, customers call Ross because we answer the phone and because our teams help solve problems, even when the issue isn’t with our own equipment.