Fox Sports centralizes World Cup production on Dell Isilon, Appear multicast, and custom HDR LUT

Fox's decision to base all World Cup production at Pico rather than at a remote IBC validates the centralized REMI model at tournament scale, with 200 concurrent feeds and 150 TB of daily media movement now handled from a permanent facility. The three-tier storage architecture — Pixitmedia, Dell Isilon, and Google Cloud — shows how broadcasters are combining on-prem high-speed NAS with cloud-based AI media management rather than choosing one or the other. Watch whether Fox keeps Pico in HDR permanently after the knockout rounds, which would signal a broader industry shift toward HDR-native production.

Fox Sports' decision to centralize its 2026 FIFA World Cup production at its Pico facility represents a significant evolution in remote production workflows for major sporting events. The network replaced its existing six-petabyte storage system with Dell PowerScale all-flash arrays after stress testing revealed the previous infrastructure could not handle the expected concurrency demands of 200 simultaneous feeds from HBS. During testing, Fox pushed the environment to 220 concurrent records, validating the storage upgrade ahead of the 104-match tournament. The facility now moves approximately 150 TB per day on upload alone, supported by a 100-gigabit interconnect pipe with its media asset management system through Google Cloud Storage.

The contribution architecture relies on Appear's platform to deliver 60 JPEG XS paths from the IBC to Pico, with two 100 Gbps diverse circuits providing redundancy between Pico, the IBC, and Fox's Tempe, Arizona facility. Fox's network engineering team implemented multicast JPEG XS traffic over the wide-area network, allowing a single encoded stream from a remote studio to be decoded simultaneously in Pico, at the IBC for shading, and at the network's New York facility without requiring decode and re-encode cycles. This multicast approach reduces latency compared to traditional unicast contribution workflows, which is critical for studio timing and transitions during live coverage.

Fox converted its entire Pico facility to HDR on May 4, making all operations in the building HDR-native for the first time. The network developed a custom HDR-to-SDR lookup table with Chromorama colorist Pablo Garcia Soriano rather than relying on the FIFA-provided LUT or the NBCUniversal LUT that Fox had used since 2018 or 2019. The custom LUT addresses specific issues with how existing solutions handled highlights during HDR-to-SDR conversion, using a monochromatic roll-off in peak-luminance regions to avoid color shifts that occur when other LUTs attempt to preserve color in bright areas.