EMG handles ‘A comet tail of complexity’ for NFL London games
Two NFL games came to London earlier this month, with the Buffalo Bills facing off against the Jacksonville Jaguars on 8 October, before the Tennessee Titans took on the Baltimore Ravens at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on 15 October.
Apart from the vibe of the fans, which is different in Europe, the NFL international games, which this year were held in London and Germany, are a mirror of a regular season American Football Conference match from a broadcast point of view, so facilities providers and production teams have to bring their A game.
“There’s a comet tail of complexity to the operation,” says Bill Morris, Emmy Award-winning technical consultant and technical supervisor for NFL London games, speaking ahead of the Titans game. “We don’t just do a major full traditional OB onsite but a completely remote production for the wrap-around shows. It is that combination which makes NFL Europe games unusually complex.”
Morris has been involved in the NFL Europe games since their launch in 2007, first at CTV, then at EMG and latterly as head of his own consultancy BMTV, which Morris dubs as “broadcast enablers” in terms of managing a lot of the planning to facilitate the smooth running of each live show onsite.
In Europe, EMG predominantly works with two major clients, Fox and CBS, depending on NFL rights deals. This year two of the three London games have landed with CBS, both held at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (the third game was held at Wembley Stadium on 1 October). CBS is producing the game within an envelope for NFL Network.
“This means NFL Network (NFLN) produces the wrap around pre-game, half-time and post-game show and CBS produces the actual game as part of that show. It is aired on both networks but it’s an NFLN show with NFLN talent,” Morris explains.
This follows the same pattern from 2022, which was a Fox show again within an NFLN envelope, but differs from previous years when the European games were done by unilateral broadcasters, CBS, Fox or ESPN (which produced this season’s Jaguars vs Falcons game from Wembley in concert with NEP in continuation of a relationship established in the US).
EMG’s “soup to nuts” provision on site in N17 ranges from accommodation for all production crew to complex transmission delivery.
“It’s a highly populated OB compound at Tottenham but geographically quite small,” says Morris. “We’ve had to think outside the box in terms of how we can accommodate all production needs.”
EMG has built “a small town” of stacked cabins and brought its own power generation units, and an enormous amount of tertiary kit for production needs. EMG’s Nova 111 is the lead truck supported by smaller units. The main gallery is in Nova 111, but EMG builds bespoke galleries for graphics and transmission in cabins which it fit out with flypack systems.
The scale of the game is on a par with a regular AFC Championship Game and as such attracts a raft of senior broadcaster execs to the venue who need to monitor and make editorial decisions onsite. To facilitate this, EMG builds them separate galleries too.
“There’s a lot of editorial work on site in terms of shaping the show, what needs to be seen and analysis,” he explains. “The broadcasters have a team of execs who are ultimately responsible for delivery so we give them access to all the sources. They have the ability to route monitoring sources to their own monitoring stack and we build a working environment where they can monitor the game in detail and have their own editorial discussions in a quiet environment rather than in the noisy cut and thrust of the main gallery.”
NFLN opens the show with an external presentation position looking at the stadium, and moves into the stadium with a custom-built NLF branded field set built by EMG’s contractor. Gradually the show moves via a reporter position pitch side up to the booth which also has a custom desk manufactured by EMG with construction partners Trans Sport.
Camera and format
Last year was the last interlaced production which has shifted to 1080p 50 SDR. “Progressive elevates the look without doubt while bringing us into line with the US broadcast norm,” Morris says. “And that’s straightforward because EMG, along with all the major OB companies, have the ability to shoot ‘P’ since we’re all UHD capable (of which Progressive is a byproduct).”
This year’s European games have more cameras than ever before. This game features 30 coverage cameras along with five presentation cams.
In addition, there are robotics on each goal provided by EMG’s specialist camera unit ACS; Spidercam, which is provided by the NFL itself; and POV cams capturing the team entrance to the field.
This year, for the first time, coverage includes Pylon Cams. The orange Pylons at each corner of the field are mounted with two cameras: one with a fixed standard lens, while the other carries a 360 lens in a feed produced by US developer C360. C360 supplies a baseband camera output from each pylon and the analyst camera.
“Within that 360 camera they are able to zoom, pan, tilt and identify action within the frame. It’s a really good system, it’s intuitive and it hit air nine times during the last game for analysis,” Morris says.
Another brand new piece of tech is the RF ‘line to game’ cameras which are designed, installed and operated by C360 in collaboration with EMG Connectivity. Operators carrying small orange Pylons move with the 1st and Ten line.
“As the action progresses down the field these RF Pylons follow to provide analysis on the line of action,” he continues. “These were used extensively at last week’s game and provide a level of analysis and level of detail of strategy we’ve not seen before in Europe.”
A Steadicam carrying a Sony FX9 and a prime film lens offers beauty shots from the sidelines offered for EVS or cut live.
“I was sceptical about this until I saw it and we’re all fans now,” Morris says. “We used it on the ESPN games last year for the first time and it gives incredible shallow depth of field. It does present a tough challenge for the operator because the line of focus is so small, but it elevates the game with that filmic look.”
Also new this year (for Europe) is the virtual 1st and Ten line (FDL) that tracks down the field as the game progresses. This is inserted locally but operated from New York “with no discernable latency”.
Morris explains: “Unlike in the US, games in Europe have unilateral broadcasters hanging onto our output. We have to produce the FDL onsite in order to pass a ‘dirty’ output to our local unilaterals.”
The main European broadcasters for this round are RTL Germany, M6 (France), Saudi TV, ITV Sport (swapping with Sky Sports for this game) and DAZN. They take the main host feed and to lesser or greater degree add their own talent and presentation.
More on 1st and Ten
The FDL was traditionally produced by SMT, initially by devising tripod heads capable of calibrating the field and by modifying the long lenses so that data was fed into the trucks to identify the FDL, which is of course a moving target.
“Now the mapping is done virtually with no modifications to the kit – which is great from a facilities company point of view,” Morris says. “We were always a little hesitant when a third party starts dismantling your lenses and providing different heads. The calibration time was also a protracted process but in the virtual world everything is much, much quicker. It is a crisper and more stable 1st and ten and it is not labour intensive.
“We’ve gone from a team of 2-3 crew on site to one operator on site just to guarantee the hardware, though in honesty the facilities provider could do this task as part of the service.”
If the workflow for the FDL operates on the same principals as remote production – labour and travel saving efficiencies – then why is more of the production also not remoted back to the US?
This is because game production is too complex for full remote. “The amount of individual feeds needing to be sent back to the States would exceed any reasonable amount of bandwidth,” says Morris.
He conservatively estimates a minimum of 100 feeds would need to go to LA. “It is a very, very well honed but complex operation. It takes the technical directors who run the switcher at least a day to build the show. Unlike European soccer events where a vision mixer cuts on behalf of the director with graphics inputs, NFL is so graphic heavy, multiple replay dependent, that the amount of feeds just exceed any reasonable budget.”
In terms of graphics, there’s no change to operation of the basic font and score. The four strong CBS/NFLN graphics team are in charge using standard Vizrt machines and three main graphics engines over and above the 1st and Ten engine and the Pylon engines onsite.
NFLN wrap production
But that’s just production of game action. A whole other setup is arranged for NFLN’s pre-, half-time and post-game programming and this is a full remote operation. It’s why just one main OB is deployed in Europe whereas an NFL game stateside would have two.
“Camera feeds with embedded audio go straight to TX where they are multiplexed and sent to the NFLN gallery in LA where the show is stitched. This comes with a comet tail of complexity in terms of transmitting multiple feeds, multiple comms between LA and site, and returns back from LA to monitor what is going on,” he explains.
The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium itself is a ground-breaking, purpose-built NFL field and one that Morris is proud of having a hand in designing the cable, connectivity and IO overlay for the NFL. The stadium is contracted to host a minimum of two games per year over a 10-year partnership.
“It is up there as one of the best stadia across both Europe and the States,” he says. “The unique thing about Tottenham is that it has a football turf pitch above the NFL astroturf – which this year is brand new. It even has a pair of dedicated NFL locker rooms which only get used twice a year.
“All the naming of the various areas are in NFL parlance so, for a US NFL operator, when they walk into that stadium it’s home. It feels, looks and is labelled as a US stadium.”