250 years of American excellence, 120 student athletes, 8 events, and almost 2 dozen TB of content combine to produce the first-ever Patriot Games in Geneva, OH last month.
The inaugural Patriot Games brought some of the country’s most promising young athletes to SPIRE Academy for a brand-new national competition celebrating America’s next generation of leaders, competitors, and champions. To capture and stream this massive amount of content, ESPN needed a production workflow capable of keeping up with an entirely new event. So who do you think they called?
CMSI provided RPOC (Remote Point of Capture), editing support, and CMSI Playbook throughout the Patriot Games, helping ESPN capture, move, access, and edit media throughout three packed days of competition.
Supporting a Brand-New National Event
Created as part of the Freedom 250 celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, the Patriot Games brought together athletes ages 14–17 from across the United States, territories, and tribal nations. Competitors were tested across events emphasizing strength, endurance, agility, teamwork, and perseverance, with $250,000 in scholarships each awarded to the competition’s male and female champions.
Coverage streamed live on the ESPN App throughout the competition, followed by a one-hour ESPN on ABC primetime special highlighting the inaugural event on August 13th.
Unlike an annual event with established systems and years of experience to build upon, the first Patriot Games required workflows capable of handling whatever the competition generated from day one.
A Lot of Competition Means a Lot of Content
Across three days of events, the Patriot Games generated a huge volume of media that needed to be captured, organized, accessed, and prepared for production. By the end of the event, CMSI’s workflows had supported over 360 hours of footage.
CMSI’s RPOC platform helped make that scale manageable by supporting efficient file-based workflows between the event and remote production resources. Combined with CMSI’s editing support, the system gave production teams fast access to the content they needed without allowing the sheer volume of incoming media to become a bottleneck. As footage was captured, it also became available within CMSI Playbook, giving producers immediate visibility and searchability into the growing content library without first having to transfer all of that media somewhere else.
That became particularly valuable for the post-production teams supporting the event. Two separate teams used CMSI Playbook to browse the growing library of footage, identify exactly what they needed, and send only those selected files directly to their editing systems. While they shared the same Playbook workflow, their production needs were very different: one team created content used throughout the competition itself, while the other turned three days of footage into the one-hour primetime special that aired after the Games.
Instead of moving hundreds of hours of footage just so producers could determine what they wanted, CMSI Playbook allowed them to watch first and transfer second. Producers could find the moments they needed within CMSI Playbook, select them, and send only those files downstream for editing.
For a first-time event generating a massive amount of content, that efficiency mattered. ESPN trusted CMSI to arrive with the infrastructure and expertise necessary to make sure the people creating the coverage could focus on the competition instead of worrying about how their media was getting from one place to another.
Student Athletes, Master Production
The athletes competing in Geneva represented an emerging generation of talent, many of them appearing before a national audience during an important moment in their young athletic careers. Behind the scenes, CMSI helped give ESPN the production tools and workflows needed to tell those stories as they unfolded.
CMSI is proud to have helped ESPN bring a brand-new competition to audiences across the country. We’re even prouder ESPN apparently has our team on speed dial, but we’ll take our cue from the players this time and just be grateful for the chance to show up.
