All the bells and whistles: Delivering top flight NFL games with a European twist
On the NFL set of Good Morning Football overlooking Tower Bridge
With the NFL International Series now established in London, and regular season games playing to packed Wembley and Tottenham Hotspur Stadiums, NFL Media is about to bring all the razzamatazz of American Football to Munich’s Allianz Arena.
The Seattle Seahawks are set to take on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on 13 November for the first-ever NFL regular-season game in Germany. And according to Dave Shaw, vice president, head of media operations at NFL Network and nfl.com, great plans are afoot ahead of the game in the home of reigning Bundesliga champions FC Bayern München. NFL Network (the pay-tv arm of NFL Media) is setting up in an old branch of Deutsche Bank looking onto the iconic square in the city, Marienplatz.
“All week long leading up to the game we’ll bring our Good Morning Football show from Munich,” Shaw tells SVG Europe. “It’s an interesting time there; it’s just after Oktoberfest and they’re starting to set up for Christmas, and Marienplatz becomes a whole Christmas Village. But that’s the kind of iconic scene that we wanted, with the City Hall, the Rathaus-Glockenspiel clock and all the architecture there. We like to be in the middle of the people and show off the city.
“We’ve taken down a wall in there, so it has nice window views of Marienplatz; we’re getting that all connected,” adds Shaw. “We’re sending our talent there to host all week long, and to build anticipation for the game.”
All the bells and whistles
Shaw oversees all the operations engineering for the NFL Media group, “whether it’s our studio operations as well as the live games and any remotes that we do”.
“In this case [live game coverage of the international games], we use Fox Sports to produce the games for us, but I’ve got oversight of the operations and technical pieces,” he adds.
In terms of production, Shaw says that the international games are very similar to what NFL Network has done for its Thursday night games over the past few years. “They’re strikingly similar in size, and we try to keep that high level,” he adds. “There’s not much difference in those coverages.”
As for talent, viewers get the full-blown high end NFL Network production experience on international games. “We cover it just the same way,” says Shaw. “We have our booth talent, both primary and play-by-play, as well as sideline reporters on both sides for covering both teams. We have a long pre-game show, as well as a post-game show. On NFL Network, we have a little longer window to put our pregame on to lead up to the game – in the States, the international games go on pretty early, for the East Coast, it’s 09:30, while out on the West Coast the game is at 06:30. So it’s a little early for some folks. We’ll come on two and a half hours earlier, but it’s great in a lot of ways. Nobody else is having a game at that point, so it’s a nice window to watch the game.”
Typically, these post and pre-game shows are remotely produced from the NFL’s facility next to SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, while the actual game coverage is produced on-site.
“The team we use to support NFL in London is EMG Live,” Shaw adds. “Whether it’s NFL Network, or whether it’s CBS or whether it’s Fox, whoever goes to London usually uses their trucks and cabling facilities.”
EMG’s Nova 111 OB unit was the primary truck used at the Spurs stadium for both of NFL’s London games in October
A-level show
This also includes deploying around 25 cameras, all shooting 1080p HD. Adds Shaw: “That would be an A-level show for any network broadcast. It’s like conference championship level in the States, only to be outdone by the Super Bowl, pretty much, so there’s plenty of coverage.”
New for the International games is the Cart Camera, a manned camera unit mounted on a motorised dolly that moves up and down the sidelines with the play. It is a fixture at US games.
“If you watch the football in the United States, you’re very much expecting [the cart camera],” says Shaw. “It’s really there for primary coverage but it can show the replays – and we expect so much out of those replays. Having [it on] a near side and a far side gives you close-ups and you can get that reverse angle.
“We also have a sky cam, which again has become one of the most used cameras and is a signature of all NFL games,” he adds. “In this case, we use Spidercam as the vendor in the international games.
“We have some remote cameras, where we can’t get to certain locations we have one in the booth, for example, so we can keep people on,” he continues. “We also have some point-of-view cameras and we do have some robotic cameras, but for the most part we’re using manned cameras.”
As for audio, all NFL games, including the internationals, have mics all over the stadium to gather the crowd noise. “NFL Film supplies the microphones,” explains Shaw. “We have mics located everywhere, on the sidelines as well. They support all the league games with microphones on the centre and in place so that you can catch the quarterback making his calls. That’s all part of the action. There’s a whole set of rules that work specifically with NFL broadcasting to make sure that you don’t have an up [mic] when you’re not supposed to. All the teams know that the microphone is going to get brought up when he’s hiking the ball and all, but it won’t be on when they’re in a huddle. That’s standard for everybody, and it’s pretty good.
“We have a little artificial intelligence (AI) going as well, to deliver some scoring and graphics pieces that we overlay on the field,” adds Shaw. “We have one of our cameras dedicated to that and a whole system set up so we can have some pretty dynamic graphics for analysis and stats that fit in nicely onto the field.”
Virtual assistant referee (VAR) reviews have had a big impact on soccer broadcasting, and there are equivalent systems used in the NFL too. “Hawk-eye is the vendor that they use,” explains Shaw. “But all the broadcasters have feeds into an instant access system they can all see locally and that can also be reviewed in the league office as well. That’s set up by the NFL IT team for every game so that everybody has the same access. They ship the equipment everywhere.”
EMG provides all the EVS operations on-site for the International Series. “For our transmission path, we have 20 dedicated feeds coming in one direction and then we send ten going back – so we have individual feeds that’ll bring in our clean feed or our dirty feed, but then we also bring in multiple cameras,” says Shaw. “We do that for our pre-game and our post-game shows primarily because we cut those back in LA.
“Our whole transmission scheme is built on that – it’s all fibre – and then we have a fully redundant fibre path. We go to two different providers, as well as having satellite backup as well.
“We bring a lot of [content] material with us, but we send it along ahead of time,” he adds. “We also can directly [transfer over fibre] anything last minute if we need to. If there are some stats, or someone is injured, or something happens in the news and they need to ship a replay or video of any kind, we have the capability to do that immediately.”
Spurs to the side
A key venue for NFL games in London is Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, a $1.07 billion new-build with a first-of-its-kind retractable grass pitch that unveils an NFL-certified football field beneath it, including locations for the cameras and booths that NFL fans are used to.
The stadium also dramatically reduces the challenges inherent in transplanting the NFL Network coverage overseas. “Tottenham is great, all the connectivity is there,” says Shaw. “There are camera positions that are completely set up for coverage of both sports; NFL groups were consulted when they built that stadium. We’ve been going to Wembley for a long time, so they know the challenges for those positions. As for the Allianz Arena in Munich, that’ll be the first US football game in that stadium, so the challenges are mainly around the dimensions of the field. I was there in June when they were digging it out, to make it longer to put goal lines in.
“For us, for the broadcasters, probably the biggest issue that we face the challenge is making sure that we get the cabling to the positions, making sure that those camera positions can cover it the way we normally would cover in the United States.”
Shaw continues: “There’s a cabling infrastructure that lives in each of these stadiums that will go to the camera positions that normally cover the sport. We extend from the location, so we have to find out where those cables are coming into and then we have to figure out where we can extend them. We might be crossing where people want to walk and that sort of thing, so we have to map all that out.
According to Shaw, an EMG team led by COO Bill Morris scouted the Allianz Arena many months ago. “Then we had to work with him and then the Arena about where we wanted the camera positions,” says Shaw. “The NFL events team, the Arena and [ourselves] all work together so we don’t block seats. In Allianz Arena, the announcer’s booth, which is always at the 50- yard line, is at a lower position than where they had the soccer one. So, we had to figure out how much space it needed and how many seats we had to move.”
Football fest
“In London, our pregame and post-game were mainly done out of LA, but we’re sending our primary pre-game team to Munich, so we’re going have more talent there,” says Shaw. “For me, it’s just a bit bigger infrastructure. We’re bringing a few more cameras back and there are things like the teleprompter that we feed from LA, so there are a few different things that we have going back and forth. Intercom is always a big issue, and latency is always a big issue, but we accomplish all those things.”
Shaw is looking forward to doing a new broadcast in “a very popular world football city” and says there’s been a lot of interest and enthusiasm around the NFL’s pop-up studio in Marienplatz.
“The German audience certainly has taken to it,” he says. “Hopefully our team can really deliver on the fun and excitement of what the game is and bring that to a new audience.”
Seattle Seahawks vs Tampa Bay Buccaneers takes place on 13 November 2022 at the Allianz Arena.