Boosting production: Inside IMG’s superfeed for the ITF Davis Cup 2023

IMG recently produced the first ever superfeed for the International Tennis Federation (ITF) Davis Cup. It brought four venue feeds from the last 16 group phase locations of the Davis Cup – Bologna, Manchester, Split and Valencia – into IMG Studios at Stockley Park to create the superfeed, where a continuity commentator, Sue Thearle, linked the action together.

Alongside the superfeed for the week-long tournament from 12 to 17 September, IMG produced daily venue recaps and match summaries, as well as a scripted 52 minute highlights show and edited content to enhance the superfeed.

Brand new superfeed

The ITF reshaped the format of the Davis Cup with a deal struck in 2019 with investment group Kosmos, switching from a home and away format to using four countries to simultaneously host the event. Although the deal ended abruptly in January this year, the shape of the tournament has remained the same with Croatia, the UK, Italy and Spain hosting the 2023 edition.

Dominic Wright, executive producer for IMG at the Davis Cup, tells SVG Europe: “The superfeed is a brand new thing for [the ITF] on a multi venue format for the last 16 phase. It’s something they’ve never done before from multiple international venues. This year we had Croatia, Britain, Italy and Spain as the four hosts. Then four teams come, so there’s 16 teams. The ITF provides a multilateral host broadcast from each of those four venues for the play, which is over six days.

“[The ITF] decided that they wanted to produce a service that presented a continuous produced feed that captured the best of the Davis Cup action for markets in both participating and non-participating nations, providing something for the consumer that doesn’t have a team in the tournament anymore,” continues Wright. “The ITF wanted to create a superfeed, which basically means [broadcasters can] pick the best match from any of the four venues to play out at any time. If Novak’s playing doubles, let’s show people Novak. Had Britain been knocked out for example, it would’ve given the British audience something to watch.”

He goes on: “It was offered to all broadcasters. [The ITF] didn’t have any takers when they decided to offer the content – the superfeed – hoping that people would get on board afterwards, which they did. It was a bit of a gamble on [the ITF’s] part, but essentially it was a new undertaking as the tournament changed format.”

Wright says the superfeed was a hit with broadcasters. He explains: “It worked and it worked very well. Bearing in mind it’s right off the back of the US Open, Novak still turned up for it and it was crewed really well with really experienced tennis people on all four venues and at Stockley Park. That’s where you have to take your hat off to the team for making that happen.”

All in the planning

The ITF created plan for the resources required for the superfeed, along with all the graphics, cosmetic elements, and non-live content inventory. Bren Hester, the ITF’s broadcast consultant, was behind the planning and design for the Davis Cup superfeed project, as well as each of the four venue multilateral feeds and edited content from IMG Studios.

John Hoggan, IMG’s head of engineering for the tournament, comments: “Bren had a very clear idea of what he wanted to achieve and how he wanted to achieve it. I think with our technology, there was a few challenges based on what he defined [as required]. He said, “we have to use this device with this sort of stuff,” but our infrastructure is slightly different. However, we did achieve the end product, which is just about getting the right workflow for how we wanted to do that.”

IMG set up different areas at its Stockley Park production centre in order to service the Davis Cup. These included a live logging area which allowed the edit producers to quickly navigate to the most relevant match highlights to craft the daily recaps, sports news edits and the highlights show.

Hoggan continues: “We had the main production gallery in our new IP gallery that we’d only recently built a few years ago. It is interesting with IP with our technology, but we provided everything that [the ITF] wanted in there. That included comms to every venue as well. That, again, is always a challenge with comms. But once everything had been established and linked, then that was all great. We used Comrex as our technology for the comms, and brought it all into the system. Then we’ve had a new graphics company, TV Graphics [that the ITF bought in]. We’ve never worked with them before. It is always great to get in somebody else and see how they do their graphics technology.”

On TV Graphics, Hoggan says: “They’re really good. Their technology was something different we had never used before; they do it a different way. Normally you’ve got the usual graphics engine, it’s got all different outputs and everything’s run-of-the-mill. But they’d done something quite unique and we had to integrate their system into ours. It was a little bit of challenge with that, but we put it together and it was fine.”

Hoggan adds on TV Graphics: “They were very bespoke of what they do. A lot of their graphics elements are just really built on a laptop, so it is getting the laptop to integrate into our TV system. They had a breakout Matrox box, but normally we would deal with a complete Viz Engine or a Chyron that’s completely designed as off the shelf. We know how they work; we slot them in, plug them up, we know we’re good to go. This was just a little bit different because we haven’t seen it before.”

Other rooms in operation for the Davis Cup at Stockley Park were replay and post production suites, “so the guys were editing and clipping up from the live matches that were going on and also using various cosmetic elements that had been prepared in advance,” says Hoggan.

For the archive room, Hoggan comments, “they were pushing all the material to the ITF Media portals. They had the facility in there to make sure that that connectivity was going to the websites, as well as archiving everything back into our storage and ready for them to take away with them”.

Boosting production

The week-long event went smoothly for the production team, says Hoggan: “It almost felt like a run of the mill production. I know it wasn’t, but from a technical point of view it was very much, “yeah, that’s fine. You need this. You need that,” and just tick them off. It was just really just making sure we were clear and got everything ticked off as Bren and the production team wanted, so it was all good.”

Notes Wright: “The Davis Cup wants to have [a similar] stature to the Grand Slams. Obviously, you want the TV production to live up to that. [The production] grew for us all the way through; just before they asked us to make some promos for them and do other bits and pieces, which we managed to facilitate. But there’s lots of learnings from it in terms of their portals not being ready for the structure that they want. It’s all those things that they want to expand, they want to grow it. I think we’re well positioned to help them do that in terms of our tennis expertise.”

Hoggan adds: “I think we started off with [a way of doing things] on day one, and by the end of the week, we had come up with something totally different and improved. I think that was working on both sides. It was finding out what’s the scope of what we can do for [the ITF] and also what helps them as well.”

Wright concludes: “[The ITF] came in very much with a clear plan of what they wanted, but they needed obviously a bit of guidance. I think we were happy that the first [tournament using the superfeed] went as easily and as well as it did, which is the key. It means that hopefully you can expand on it as things go on.”

IMG is providing post production services for the Davis Cup Final 8 from Malaga on the 21 to 26 November, including producing bespoke opening sequences for the venue multilateral broadcast