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STRONGERTOGETHER
#IBC2021
GETTING THE FANS ON BOARD
How does a major sports broadcaster mobilise its audience and suppliers into taking action on sustainability? And just how can diversity on TV be advanced? Sky Sports’ Inga Ruehl tells IBC what broadcasters can to do solve some of today’s issues
BY MICHAEL BURNS
As executive director of production services and operations for Sky Sports, Inga Ruehl is in charge of the production management team that manages all of Sky Sports’ output, which includes over 800 host broadcasts a year and 11 live channels. She is also responsible for the operations department, which looks at workfl ows, considering new technologies and how the company is going to change the way it operates. Part of this is looking at how to infl uence partners towards sustainable production, for example Sky’s involvement in Game Zero, the world’s fi rst net-zero carbon elite football match between Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea earlier this year. Ruehl says Sky has been sure to get its own house in
order too. “Sky Sports has been carbon neutral since 2006, but obviously, net-zero carbon is a lot more ambitious, because we can’t just offset our carbon emissions, we have to reduce them,” she says. “My team focuses a lot on what we do behind the scenes, how we create our productions and how we reduce our emissions.” “All our OBs are using biodiesel,” she continues. “We’ve been using biodiesel for a while on all of our journeys. It’s not the perfect solution, but it has drastically reduced emissions. We also work closely with the content teams [who feel] we have such an amazing opportunity to not only inform the customer but possibly also infl uence the customer, and hopefully eventually mobilise the customer. “The Sky Sports audience is not necessarily an audience that engages with this subject so much, but all sports will be affected by it. It’s a great opportunity to get to an audience that’s not proactively looking for content around the climate crisis.”
INNOVATION ACCELERATION “Covid fast-tracked [projects] that we had started or were working on,” Ruehl observes. “We did things in six months that we had planned to do in two or three years.” Remote production is probably the biggest example of this. “We’ve been on the remote production journey for around seven years,” she says. “The fi rst sport that we took remotely completely was F1. We don’t produce the event coverage, but we had quite a signifi cant presence to produce the presentation coverage. We’ve now done that remotely for ourselves, Sky Germany and Sky Italy for around four years.”
The big game-changer for Sky happened pre-Covid when it took its English Football League (EFL) coverage remote. “That meant not just presentation, but the whole match coverage,” says Ruehl. “We only brought the people on site who had to be there with a small truck, then brought all the feeds back to base in Osterley [Sky’s TVC in West London]. We had nearly a full season under our belts when Covid hit and that allowed us to iron out workfl ow issues, operational issues, skills issues and technical issues.” “When we knew sport was coming back, we were in a really good position to take everything else remote
Ruehl: “It’s a real struggle for women in a lot of roles on productions”
because of the work we had done beforehand,” she continues. “We took the Premier League remote, which for us was massive. It also really helped us with reducing our carbon emissions. We always knew that it would, so it was always in our trajectory, but it just happened a lot quicker.” Sky now produces most of its live match coverage at Osterley. “That’s been the biggest transition,” she continues. “Obviously the more you rely on technology to do it, the more you rely on the people with skills to look after that, and while we’ve got amazing people, we’ve just not got quite enough of them.”
“It’s a great opportunity to get to an audience that’s not proactively looking for content around the climate crisis,” Inga Ruehl, Sky Sports
DIVERSE SKILLS
The latter point ties into the skills, training and recruitment side of the broadcast industry, which Ruehl feels could be more diverse. “We have to acknowledge what our pipeline looks like: predominantly white and male,” she says. “How do we address that? We’re doing as much as we can on education and keeping the conversation going at every level. We’ve got Sky Content Academy. We’ve got production junior roles where we really focus on this.” “From what I’ve seen, particularly in the last year and a half where we’ve worked so hard on the subject, there are no quick fi xes,” she adds. “We’ve tried to be as creative as we can on all different levels. [In recruitment] will it be more helpful to create more diversity in the team rather than going for exactly the skillset? In the past, I would have only looked at the skillset of the individual. Now I think about the fact that if want a truly
diverse team, I will value the diversity an individual brings as highly as a skill.”
Ruehl also points out that production is not necessarily a very family-friendly environment. “Whether you’re a content creator, behind the scenes,
crew, or technical or production manager, you have to work when the events are. In sport, they’re very often on the weekends. The hours are often unsociable, we’re working shifts, and so on,” she says. “That’s diffi cult for any parent. But we still live in a society where a lot of that is carried by the mothers. It’s a real struggle for women in a lot of those roles on productions. What will help with that, as society moves along, is more fathers taking their paternity leave and looking after the children as well.” She feels that Sky is a leader in this area. “Sky has leaned into making sure that we make this workable for women,” she says. “It has been amazing around fl exible working and reduced hours. “You also sometimes feel that when you’re in the minority, you bring a bit extra because you have a different perspective, and I feel like that is valued here.” Ruehl also feels that representation of women is
increasing on-screen.“The FIFA Women’s World Cup was probably the one event that showed everyone that the interest is absolutely there,” she says. “Finally I think there’s some acknowledgement that the audiences are there, and the home audiences want to watch. I think it’s great that a lot of the broadcasters are now really putting it more front and centre. “At Sky, and Sky Sports in particular, we’ve been taking the opportunity to use our voice more and step into subjects that we think we should be on the right side of, whether that’s women’s sports, or whether that’s racism, online hate, or sustainability.”
Watch the full interview on IBC Digital
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