The women’s and men’s Pac-12 basketball tournaments wrapped up last weekend with the Stanford women defeating Utah on March 6th, and the Arizona men taking the win over UCLA on Saturday, March 12th. Each tournament hosted eleven games in Las Vegas, with over 1.6 million total viewers tuning in to watch the championship games.
With an exciting couple of weeks of basketball played, it’s easy to forget the people and technology that make large-scale events like this possible. In 2016, Pac-12 Networks partnered with Zayo to boost their bandwidth capability for their live sporting events. They needed a reliable solution to help them broadcast every dunk, layup, and blocked shot. In just 12 days, Zayo installed a Wavelength solution from the T-Mobile Arena and/or Michelob Ultra Arena in Las Vegas to the Pac-12 Network headquarters 500 miles away in San Francisco, creating a seamless broadcast and streaming experience for viewers. This partnership proved that Zayo could quickly create a slam dunk network solution to meet their needs.
What does our partnership mean for the viewer?
It’s true that Zayo’s network allows for high-capacity broadcasts, like the one we saw this weekend, but what exactly does that mean for the viewer? Our network provides the ability for Pac-12 Network to implement things like instant replays, multiple high-definition cameras, and 24/7 coverage of sporting events.
Pac-12 Network utilizes Zayo’s Wavelength and Dark Fiber Network to connect to their dedicated transport network backbone to process and play high-definition replays during games. The next time you see a bunch of high-definition angles of a windmill dunk, remember that Zayo is helping make that possible.
Why Zayo?
However, the most important part of the Pac-12 Network’s use of Zayo’s infrastructure might be the opportunities for quickly bringing sporting events to life. Making infrastructure scalable and future-proof for additional fan experiences down the line is at the forefront of Pac-12’s priorities. When you are putting on an event like the Pac-12 basketball tournament, the last thing you want to be worrying about at the buzzer is “can our network handle the load?”. There’s no need for bandwidth to be a concern when you can scale up and down as you please.
Not only does the Pac-12 need reliable connectivity at all times for the hundreds of live events they cover, but they need the ability to handle high volumes of traffic when they put on marquee events like their annual basketball tournament. Zayo’s mix of connectivity types has helped create a custom solution for the Pac-12 Network that provides all the reliability and scalability they need.
As the Conference of Champions gets bigger and more people are tuning in, the Pac-12 Network needs the ability to scale with their fanbase. We here at Zayo are proud of our partnership with Pac-12 Network and we can’t wait to connect them to what’s next.