Senior Solutions Architect → Director of Technical Operations

Turner Broadcasting System (Turner) created PlayOn Sports to chase long-tail sports content — tier-two and tier-three college conferences, lesser pro leagues; the ACC, the Atlantic Sun, the United Soccer League. Big enough to draw an audience, too small for a 53-foot ESPN production trailer. It was run like a startup inside Turner, and it was working — but in 2008 Turner divested everything that wasn’t core, and PlayOn was on the list. David Rudolph, the Turner executive who had sponsored PlayOn internally, believed in it enough to leave, start a company, and buy the brand — then pivoted it at the high-school sports market.

I believed in it too. I’d run GeorgiaDogs.com and spent years in sports media; a company building online media and producing live sports sat exactly at the intersection of everything I knew. In 2010 I joined as the fifth employee. When I left in 2013, we were eighty — carrying 40,000 live high-school events a year: live, on demand, and on TV.

Standing up the platform

I joined on the technology side as Senior Solutions Architect, getting PlayOn’s video player and content management system up and running — a Drupal-based event catalog (later rebuilt in Rails) with the website on EC2 and S3 in an era when AWS itself was still young. Streaming meant dedicated Windows Media Server instances at first; we later partnered with Wowza, and later still moved onto AWS’s own video services as they emerged. The business model was season-long all-access subscriptions and à la carte pay-per-view, with revenue shared with the state high-school athletic associations.

TV quality on a shoestring

The more the company saw how much I knew about live production, the more of that side of the house I took on — eventually becoming Director of Technical Operations, effectively head of technical operations for the company, handing my web duties off as I went. The core challenge: produce TV-quality live game coverage on a fraction of a TV budget. We kept shrinking the footprint — smaller production trucks, then a Sprinter van I built out myself with a light crew and equipment load, then fly-pack kits you could roll into a hotel conference room. For the marquee events — state football championships in the Georgia Dome — we still hired full production trucks, satellite uplinks, and complete crews.

Anything concerning delivery of picture and sound from venue to streaming host was my domain. I did the technical assessments, decided what we bought versus rented, managed the vendors and budgets, and built and maintained the trucks — at one point putting ten TriCasters on my company AmEx at $25,000 apiece, a transaction that cost more than my first house. In the field I served as substitute technical director, replay operator, sound engineer, cameraman — whatever the production needed. And as our network of schools grew, many began producing their own broadcasts through their broadcast-education programs, with our platform carrying them.

Keeping the picture up

Friday nights were brutal: I’d be on-site at the week’s marquee game while dozens of other live games ran across the state — hundreds across the country — all kicking off at once, which is why we began building out a streaming operations center. Field engineering meant preparing for literally anything a venue could throw at you: encoding on a laptop with a capture card, site surveys that said nothing about what game-day crowds would do to the venue’s bandwidth, experiments with cellular bonding to push a broadcast over mobile networks rather than rent a satellite uplink.

Colleagues joked that I was always over-prepared. The record says I kept productions on the air. Before our first live Friday-night football broadcast, I insisted on a full-crew preseason rehearsal — not live, just real. It was a disaster, first-timers everywhere, and it’s why the real thing wasn’t. When I spec’d our Sprinter van, I insisted on an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) big enough to run the entire van for thirty minutes; during a live broadcast, someone tripped a breaker on the venue power feeding us and nobody told me for twenty minutes. I found out with about eight minutes of battery left, pulled extension cords to a fresh circuit, and the picture never dropped.

What it became

The platform I built became the NFHS Network — the National Federation of State High School Associations’ streaming platform. It’s been retooled over the years — new Rails backend, new player — but it’s the same product, and it’s still the main thing PlayOn Sports does today: partnered with some 8,000 high schools across all 50 states, streaming more live sporting events than any other company in the world. In 2022, PlayOn took a strategic investment from KKR and Panoramic Ventures. The financial terms were never publicly disclosed, but the deal ran to the high nine figures — just shy of a billion dollars. That’s the kind of outcome that makes early-startup equity worth the bet. I’ll take it.