Barix Brings Spanish Broadcasts To Life

With the National Football League's 2023-24 season underway, San Francisco 49ers fans have already enjoyed access to live Spanish language game broadcasts thanks in part to Audio over IP technology from Barix.

The technology was embraced by 49ers Studios to create a simple remote broadcast workflow for away games, allowing engineers to plug in a Barix Instreamer device and return live gameday audio to studios in Mexico and San Francisco.

The Instreamer is Barix's "classic" Audio over IP encoder, and is used worldwide at origination points to encode and stream program audio to studios, transmitter sites and other end points where audio is received. In sports, the Instreamer is a popular choice for remote broadcasting, where the producer or engineer needs only an Instreamer, a microphone, and a laptop to reliably move high-quality audio back to the studio. Some customers such as the 49ers Studios use a slightly more elaborate setup that includes several microphones and a small mixer, but the workflow remains simple, reliable and affordable.

Matias Godinez, Spanish Broadcast Engineer and Producer for the San Francisco 49ers, said that his team first used the Instreamer to inject crowd noise into home broadcasts before deciding to take it on the road to capture entire away games. "We launched a Spanish-language content initiative in 2018 that has been successful, and our Spanish broadcast team now travels to away games," said Godinez. "We wanted something that was plug-and-play for road broadcasts, and it doesn’t get any simpler than the Instreamer. Once we establish an ethernet connection, the device is online and the audio can start to flow."

Barix Exstreamer devices receive and decode the Instreamer-encoded streams back at Levi Stadium in San Francisco, where gameday audio is then delivered to various terrestrial, web, mobile and social media platforms. That includes the 49ers Spanish language website at https://www.49ers.com/game-day/ and 33 radio stations in Mexico.

Godinez’s gameday configuration typically includes a small audio mixer to pull feeds from two headset mics, one referee mic and one crowd effective, ensuring a professional production for audiences as they enjoy listening to popular play-by-play announcer Jesus Zarate. "The Barix devices ultimately bring the broadcast to listeners," said Godinez. "As long as we have a stable internet connection with a base 5Mb/s bandwidth, the Instreamer consistently does its job, and the Exstreamer handles the rest back at our studios. The simplicity and the convenience can't be beat."

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