We had a bye week. We wanted to show off.
Palmetto High had a bye week and TigerVision had nothing on the schedule. Rather than take the night off, the team asked a question: could we pull off an NFL RedZone-style broadcast for Manatee County high school football?
NFL RedZone, for those unfamiliar, is a live channel that bounces between every game in real time — cutting to whichever team is in the red zone, showing every score, never missing a moment. Scott Hanson hosts it solo for seven straight hours every Sunday. We had one announcer, a bye week, and nothing to lose.
No cameras. No crew on location. Just execution.
Five Manatee County schools were streaming their games live on YouTube that night. We didn’t need our own cameras — we used theirs. The production team pulled each live feed and mixed them together, switching between games exactly like the NFL Network does, taking game audio when it served the broadcast and cutting back to the announcer when it didn’t.
One of the signature features was the QUADBOX — a split-screen view showing four games simultaneously, exactly like the NFL RedZone whip-around format. When multiple games had action worth watching at the same time, we could show all of them at once. It’s a production technique that requires real-time feed management and a director who knows what they’re doing.
Ken Burton, Jr. — Manatee County Tax Collector and TigerVision announcer — called the entire broadcast remotely from his house, about two miles down the road. He set up each game, moved between matchups, and ran the show exactly the way Scott Hanson runs RedZone: authoritative, fast, and with a feel for where the action was.
The result was a single cohesive live broadcast covering all five Manatee County games simultaneously, produced without a single camera of our own, from a living room two miles away. With our dual replay stations, the setup is capable of managing up to 16 simultaneous feeds — the five-game debut was just the beginning.
As far as we know, it had never been done before.
A live RedZone-style whiparound broadcast for high school football — covering an entire county’s worth of games in real time with a single remote host — is not something that had been done before at this level, as far as we can tell. The NFL has a hundred-million-dollar infrastructure behind RedZone. We did it on a bye week with volunteer labor and a home internet connection.
It worked. The broadcast was successful, the concept translated, and it proved something important: the format isn’t dependent on owning cameras or having crew on the ground. It’s a production challenge, not an equipment challenge. And production is what we do.
Starts at the 13:28 mark where the broadcast hits its stride.
“We had a bye week, a live stream, and an idea. By the end of the night we had proven it could be done.”