“It’s not enough to provide acres of video ‘canvas’ if you don’t have the production support systems in place for operators to ‘paint’ on it,” says Stuart Reynolds who has lead the video systems design for Lincoln Financial Field, Dodger Stadium and is currently working with the San Francisco Giants. "The video systems are about way more than what the fans see. They are about the infrastructure, content production and game day operation."

Not only does the NFL maintain every game ever captured, but coaches can access every play from every game from every team in the history of football. At the college level, they usually go back for at least five years. “There is a tremendous amount of metadata tracked for every minute of sports video,” says Stuart Reynolds of Acoustic Dimensions. “The only way to achieve consistency in the creation of the metadata is to record it when you create the content. If you have to go back and do it later, it takes twice the amount of time.”

Stuart Reynolds explains it this way, “There are two issues when it comes to digital archiving: storage and access. With regard to storage, a lot comes down to asking yourself, ‘How much compression am I willing to tolerate?’ In some cases, the answer is ‘none’ and you will have to store the video in a physical location. In other cases, storing in MPEG or other compressed format is appropriate, in which case you can store it on a video server, such as those manufactured by Sony or Doremi. My current favorite in the sports world is Click Effects because the user interface provides easy access to clips via touchscreen blending the boundaries between storage and access.”