SENZ is a young, 24-hour sports radio network serving a country with a population roughly a tenth the size of Shanghai. That may sound silly, but this is no ordinary country – it is, by its own admission, a sports-crazy New Zealand. SEN- Sports Entertainment Network New Zealand is the local extension of Australia’s SEN brand and provides live sports broadcasts, racing and sports talk to an enthusiastic target audience of men aged 25-54.
SENZ’s launch date was not ideal. The network launched on April 19, 2021, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, with few live sporting events; those that did occur were without crowds. Hardly conducive to a compelling sound. At the time, the network was operating out of New Zealand’s former Stanley Street Trackside Radio studios for racing, which offered coverage and commentary on horse and dog racing. SENZ was keen to develop its own brand and identified space in the trendy, historic Saatchi and Saatchi Building in nearby Parnell to build dedicated studios. The push to create a new network was driven by a sense of urgency: the studios’ leases were about to expire; time was of the essence.
Essentially, everything had to be bigger – multiple channel inputs and outputs, more console channels… whatever.
SENZ received all the equipment. As Pearson and the SEN team were stuck in Australia due to COVID-related travel restrictions in New Zealand, New Zealand teams had to oversee the on-site installation and the seamless transition of broadcasting to the new studios.
Simplicity and adaptability were the hallmarks of the build approach. “Keeping things simple makes everything easy to work with; it also means there are fewer things in the way that can go wrong,” said Bacon. An example was the setup of live audio streams. SENZ uses established channels instead of physically laying cables at multiple sporting events. For those events where SENZ has on-field commentary, its primary technology is Tieline.
Tailoring the equipment to their needs was critical – another reason they chose Wheatstone, especially the ability to use scripting to develop better workflows on the WheatNet-IP network. For example, SENZ created button scripts on the SS-8 OLED control panel to map microphones to incoming remote channels. Each microphone is automatically linked to the right mix-minus or bus-minus, whether it’s an announcer on the field or a commentator in the studio next door.