March 2015 - March and April are among the busiest months of the year for Bexel's equipment rentals. With NCAA March Madness, Major League Baseball's opening, the start of NBA and NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs, and large-scale events like the Masters Golf Tournament, it's a hectic, but successful time.SVG sat down with Bexel VP of Account Development Lee Estroff to discuss his team's approach to the chaos, the company's new facility in New York City, and what technologies sports clients are demanding these days.Bexel opened a new location in New York City this month. How do you see that facility benefiting your sports-production clients?We acquired the space through an acquisition of Autocue, which we're excited to have as part of our product offering and really enhances our teleprompter business. With that, we acquired a Midtown Manhattan space.

We have a 30,000-sq-ft. facility in Secaucus [NJ] with about 15 employees, which is great for storing the extensive amounts of inventory that we have and gives us a lot of space. We overgrew our [previous] Midtown space years ago, so we made the move out to Secaucus. But we realized pretty quickly that having a Manhattan location was important. We realized that, [although] we may be 3 miles away across the river, it may as well be 1,000 miles away. We now have this completely renovated Manhattan space that will serve as a depot to give our clients the ability to pick up and drop off equipment and have meetings in the city.CBS and Turner Sports rely heavily on Bexel during March Madness season and for other major sports events coming in April. How does Bexel juggle all those obligations?March and April are crazy for us in the sense that you have the [NCAA] tournament going on, we're preparing for the Masters, we're preparing for NBA Playoffs, baseball season is about to begin. Of course, there's NAB [2015] to get ready for. So it is a crazy but exciting time.In terms of the [NCAA] tournament, we have been working with CBS and Turner over the past few months, preparing for how we're going to deploy the various equipment to the first, second and third-round sites: from super-slo-mos to EVS's, to fiber, to the lighting, to monitoring, and all kinds of odds and ends. So it's this big, orchestrated movement. Everything is deployed to the first site, and then everything travels either through truck or through SOS [Global Express] to the regionals. From the regional round, the majority of that equipment will end up in Indianapolis [for the Final Four] and meet up with our edit truck [and] all of the other necessary items for CBS, CBS Sports Network, Turner Sports. We're actually doing some stuff with NCAA. So we have multiple clients that will be using our gear in Indianapolis.I give credit to [CBS Sports Executive Director, Field Operations,] John McCrae and [Turner Sports Director, Technical Operations,] Chris Brown and the folks at CBS and Turner. They do a great job in charting things out, and they're very organized with their shipping schedules. The tech managers are heavily involved, so they really understand what it takes to make all this work.Over the past couple of years, your 53-ft. BBS1 has been at big events all over the country in a variety of capacities. Why do you think this unit has become so popular with broadcasters?BBS1 has become a staple pretty much for every big event, whether it's for CBS or for Fox or for Turner. It's like a Swiss Army knife basically because anything you want, we can make it happen. It was just at the NBA All-Star game, it will be at Final Four, and then it will be at the MLB All-Star Game for Fox.

It's very high in demand because it's so flexible. At Final Four, it will have five edit bays; at the MLB All-Star Game, it may be an executive green room. It could be one edit bay, it could be six edit bays, and it could be Avid or Apple Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere. I mean you're not locked into anything, and that's the beauty of it. That's why I think it's been popular. And we have great engineers to go with it; as much as [customers] request the truck, they are also requesting our engineers. Equipment is replaceable, engineering is not. It's very flexible and scalable, so we can price it depending on what you want.Have you seen a specific rise in demand for any specific piece of equipment or system?I'm amazed at how quickly the Grass Valley [LDX XS] 6X ultra-slo-mo [camera] has become almost a staple for us. We have a sizable inventory, and we can't keep them in-house. There will also be a lot of new [technology] coming out of NAB [2015] that will give our clients even more options and power when it comes to slo-mo.

Our fiber-management service just continues to flourish. I think people are realizing that the shows are becoming so big and so complex, you almost need one central point or person to manage all the signal flow. And that's where we come in with our fiber engineers and technology. We are able to centralize and coordinate audio/video flow within a compound, between multiple compounds. Again, I contend that our guys - [Bexel ESS Manager, Fiber Business Segment,] Justin Paulk and his team - are the best in the industry. I think that's been a lot of the reason that has flourished, because they trust us and know what we're capable of. They've seen what we've done at Super Bowls, All-Star Games, and golf events. That's something that, if it doesn't work and the signals aren't where they need to go, it's a major train wreck.Have you seen a rise in interest and demand for 4K production equipment yet? How is Bexel approaching 4K/UHD on a near-term basis?We did a large 4K job with NEP around the Cricket World Championships in Australia. We're seeing some growth but not off-the-chart growth. I think there will be news coming out at NAB [2015] that will give us the ability to do more. But, while it's important to us and we will stay positioned to be ready for 4K, it's not a primary focus, because the market demand is not through the roof at the moment.Any other major areas of growth for Bexel recently?The reality-TV business has been unbelievable. The amount of momentum we have for that out of our Burbank office - ranging from F5s to F55s to C300s, the new FS7s - is just off the charts right now. We're seeing a lot of growth in that area. We've tooled our inventory out in Burbank for that, and we're seeing the benefits of making that investment. It's so unlike what I'm used to in the sports world, where there's one Super Bowl and one Final Four every year. Out there, it's like, every week, there's a new major reality show starting up. It's really exciting to be a part of that world, but it's competitive.Read the article on SportsVideo.org.[sc name="news-footer"]