Moody College and Texas Athletics Partner to Put Students in the Broadcast Booth

Last year, Arianna Tway made history. 

The UT Radio-Television-Film senior became the first-ever student technical director for a Texas Athletics game at the Moody Center. Tway controlled everything the audience saw on the jumbotron at the venue, home to the Texas Men and Women’s Basketball programs. 

She pushed buttons connected to live cameras and graphics that would appear on screen upon her touch. To her surprise, one of the visuals that displayed on the jumbotron was a message of congratulations for her achievement.  

“My boss totally tricked me because he was trying to tap me on the shoulder and talk to me while I was doing the big screen,” says Tway, who graduates this May. “And then I see it.”  

Tway earned this opportunity through Bevo Video Productions (BVP), Moody College’s student-led video production company. BVP, launched in 2019 as a part of Texas Student Media and the Moody College in a cooperative effort with Texas Athletics, offers opportunities for UT students to participate in real-world sports broadcast production. BVP also offers high-quality video content services for UT Austin entities.  

Students from BVP, along with broadcast production professionals, local freelancers, and students in Moody College’s sports production and broadcast minor, staff Texas Studios, the new broadcast and videoboard production center located inside Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium.  

The state-of-the-art Texas Studios Powered by Dell Technologies includes four new production control rooms, a central server room, a camera shading workspace, three audio control rooms, an engineering operations center, a kitchenette, and a studio multipurpose space.  

Texas Studios staff and BVP students will use the space to produce live games on SEC Network and ESPN’s family networks. They will also execute in-video productions at DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium, Gregory Gym, Mike A. Myers Track and Soccer Stadium, Moody Center, UFCU Disch-Falk Field, and McCombs Field.  

Chances are a student captured the big dunk for fans to enjoy on the jumbotron at the Moody Center. And there’s probably a student in the control room who rolled back the replay of the big dunk and played it out.  

“Students are mission critical, and Texas Studios is the latest, flashiest tool in the tool belt for Texas Athletics and even the University,” says Caten Hyde, UT’s senior associate athletics director of creative development and video and production. “We’ve got extremely talented students on the creative side as well, and their work can be seen all over, from the videos that play on the video board to some of the features that play on the broadcast. Students are really, really key to what we do.”  

Texas Studios, which opened in August 2024, had been in development for several years. Gerald Johnson, Moody College’s executive director for innovation and partnerships, says conversations about the project began in 2018.  

It was announced in 2019, but the COVID-19 pandemic slowed down progress for the new initiative.  

“As we came out of lockdown, we started rolling those things back into play,” Johnson says.  

The announcement of Texas’ move to the Southeastern Conference in 2021 helped push development further along, Hyde says. ESPN has an agreement with the SEC, and UT would have new obligations for live events. The linear Longhorn Network also went away.  

With understanding of those new obligations, Texas opted to no longer outsource its in-venue production and instead participate in ESPN’s campus control room project.  

“The idea behind that is, instead of ESPN having to roll a truck in for every game they ever do, build facilities in athletic departments or on campus, and ESPN will provide a stipend to do these games,” Hyde says.  

Texas, which Hyde says was in a lot of ways in last place when it came to live production capabilities, decided to build the production facility in DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium. It was a challenge, as UT left for the SEC a year earlier than scheduled, and the football stadium reached its centennial in 2024.  

“Building brand new technology in a 100-year-old stadium, you’re looking in every nook and cranny. Every storage room. Every closet, to try to find a place to build this production facility, and we found one. It’s in the northwest corner of DKR,” says Hyde, who added that there’s four production control rooms at DKR and a fifth at the Moody Center. “It’s an awesome space.”  

Johnson says it’s important that students have opportunities that BVP and Texas Studios created.  

They can also pursue the sports production and broadcasting minor, a new field of study that allows students of any major at UT to learn valuable skills such as cutting highlight packages, creating social media assets, producing stories, and more.  

“It really bridges the practical that they’re learning in class with the actual,” Johnson says, “and gives all students, regardless of what program they’re participating in, a leg up on their competition when they’re looking for full-time employment after graduation.”  

Working for BVP has certainly helped Tway, who says she joined the organization because she feared she didn’t have enough production experience. Now, she has the confidence to cut a live show in front of thousands of people.  

After graduation, she hopes sports video production is still part of her life. That very well could be the case for Tway, who has already served as a technical director at a major athletic event before receiving her college degree.  

“I have gotten so much sports experience. My bosses always stress that no other school does this,” Tway says. “Students are mainly running the show now.”

CREDITS: Courtesy of Moody College of Communication