GENRE REPORT


LIVE TV


“REMOTE PRODUCTION IS NOW OUR STANDARD WORKFLOW”


JAMIE HINDHAUGH, BT SPORT


SPORTS Compared to other live sectors, the sports industry has got off relatively lightly in the Covid-19 era. Premier League football, for example, returned on 17 June after lockdown, albeit to empty stadiums. Premiership Rugby, meanwhile, started back up on 14 August, after 159 days away. In live sports, the swift adoption of remote


production has arguably been the biggest change of the Covid-19 era – and it’s one that looks set to stay when social distancing eases. Graham Fry, executive chairman of production


at IMG, says remote production has been brought forward at least two years by the pandemic. The sports production firm has remotely produced coverage of sports such as the World Snooker


Championships, ATP Tour, the Premier League, Champions League and the Football League out of its studios in West London’s Stockley Park. “We’ve never had a run on our studios like this,”


says Fry, pointing out that Stockley Park also hosted shows like Question Time during the pandemic. To fit all the productions in Stockley Park, IMG’s


engineering team had to build a pop up studio in a next door building, says Sheilagh Little, operations director at IMG Media. One of the key challenges for Little during the pandemic has been to keep people socially distanced in Stockley Park, given the demand for its studios. IMG has now starting work on building an extra studio to cope with demand. In IMG’s case, it was ready for the most extreme form of remote production if needed during the


pandemic. Fry says IMG has a system ready to go where it could have directed Football League matches from people’s living rooms if needed, albeit very simply. “We never had to do it, but we were ready to go.” The production company now has, for example, four cameramen at Championship matches, and one at League One and Two matches, but all of the directing of the matches is done remotely in Stockley Park. For BT Sport, remote production has also come


to the fore during the pandemic. “Remote production is now our standard workflow,” says BT Sport COO Jamie Hindhaugh. The broadcaster was already 18 months into a four year transition plan to remote production when Covid hit. But, within in a few weeks, everything switched to remote production.


Spring 2021 televisual.com 47


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