From a first-of-its-kind accessibility feed to a new graphics supplier and the BBC’s Signals layer, The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) is opening The Championships to new and underserved audiences while helping ever-wider audiences understand the action. The All England Club’s Paul Davies, associate director, Broadcast, Production and Media Rights; Georgina Green, head of broadcast and production; and Roberto Quintana, broadcast technical manager, explain.
If cameras get viewers closer to the play, it is the data, graphics and analysis that help them understand it and this year, Wimbledon Broadcast Services (WBS) has made efforts to further demystify the sport and reveal the tactics, trends and moments that shape every match.
For The Championships 2026, the All England Club, AKQA and Hawk-Eye rolled out ‘HawkAR: Inclusive Feed’, a combined accessibility layer for singles matches played on Centre Court. The feed was available on BBC iPlayer and featured synchronised spatial audio cues and augmented visual overlays to aid tennis fans who are blind or partially sighted.
Paul Davies, associate director, Broadcast, Production and Media Rights at the All England Club, says: “Wimbledon has a long history of embracing innovation to enhance how fans experience The Championships, and the HawkAR: Inclusive Feed represents a significant step forward in that journey.
“By bringing together pioneering technology and making the feed available on BBC iPlayer, we’re creating a more inclusive and immersive way for blind and low-vision audiences to experience live tennis. We believe this initiative sets a new benchmark for accessibility in sport, helping more fans than ever before share in the drama, emotion and excitement of Wimbledon.”
That instinct – to open the game up to audiences who may not follow it closely – also runs through WBS’s approach to data and graphics, where the aim is not just to show the numbers but to explain them.
In terms of suppliers, SMT, working in partnership with IBM, is responsible for match data collection, while Deltatre assumed responsibility for delivering The Championships’ live broadcast tennis graphics following a competitive tender process completed last year.
Explains Georgina Green, head of broadcast and production: “We still hire and train the operators; they are tennis specialists that are then trained in either data entry or graphics operations. Deltatre are then responsible for the delivery of the graphics, taking the creative design templates that sit with Moov, and taking the data from SMT. It all went relatively smoothly on day one, which is impressive given that we don’t have a qualifying competition on-site to help us prepare.”
Analysis and data are significant areas of focus not only for All England Club’s broadcast partners, but also for Davies and the WBS team.
For this year’s BBC coverage of The Championships, Jamie Murray has joined BBC Sport’s presentation line-up to give deeper analysis of selected matches. This year’s Championships also saw the launch of Signals, the interactive layer that ran alongside the BBC’s live Wimbledon coverage and used the All England Club’s ball and player-tracking data to deliver on-screen serve speeds, winners, dominance graphs and match quizzes.
Davies says: “While Wimbledon is a broader sporting event, it’s important that we maintain real credibility within tennis. That means looking beyond The Championships to the wider sport and working towards greater consistency in how tennis is presented. Terminology still varies from event to event, so through a number of working groups, the T7 – the WTA, ATP, World Tennis and the four Grand Slams – are collaborating to standardise tennis terminology and shape the next phase of that work. We’re not quite there yet, but there’s real potential to share much more of that data.
“At the moment, we’re focused on live match statistics, but the next step is exploring how we can integrate archival records, not just from Wimbledon, but from the other Grand Slams and potentially the Tours as well. That would provide much richer context around every match, both in the build-up and in real time, helping audiences better understand the stories, rivalries and performances behind the action.”
Davies says: “Jess Weeks now leads our broadcast data integration work, collaborating closely with Hawk-Eye, TennisViz, SMT, Deltatre and Moov on both the design of our graphics and the information they present, making sure viewers can easily understand and engage with what they’re seeing.
“It’s a really exciting area, and with commercial partners such as IBM, Rolex and American Express associated with those graphics, there’s also an important partnership element to integrate. We feel we’ve taken that offering to the next level, and it’s been encouraging to see broadcasters, particularly ESPN, Tennis Channel, BBC, TNT & Amazon Prime really embrace it.”
Bringing these systems together has been a significant undertaking for Roberto Quintana, broadcast technical manager, who joined WBS in January. He says: “Delivering the new graphics ecosystem required extensive integration across multiple systems, including data, scoring, production and distribution workflows. “The focus throughout was ensuring reliability and consistency across every feed while creating opportunities for more dynamic graphics and enhanced storytelling. It’s been a significant collaborative effort between WBS, Deltatre and our wider technology partners.”
