This weekend the Isle of Man TT – dubbed one of the most dangerous motorbike races in the world due to a high death rate amongst participants – is set to roar to a start as the chequered flag drops on the first of 13 days of racing.

Host broadcaster for the event organiser, the Isle of Man government, is Greenlight Productions. As well as adding ever-more cameras to this year’s live coverage, which begins on 26 May and runs to 7 June 2025, Greenlight has enhanced the graphics package with a new on-screen graphics package. This will help to decipher time gaps between bikes, allowing viewers to keep track of those all-important leaderboards, as well as providing more updates on competitors circulating further down the running order.

This year Greenlight is using different data to make the sometimes complex racing in the first week a little easier for viewers at home to understand, on the Isle of Man government’s TT Live Pass streaming app.

Translating data into graphics

Graphics for the event work hand in hand with the Isle of Man government’s own bespoke event management system, which has evolved over the years. Greenlight Productions uses a Vizrt graphics system, “to interrogate the event management system to get the timing graphics out and all that kind of stuff,” says Aisling Ridout, production manager at Greenlight Productions.

“They’ve got speed traps and all that lovely juicy stuff as people like to see just how fast people are going. We’ve had our own graphics package built under the branding guidelines of the event, so we’ve got lots of really lovely graphics as well.”

This year Greenlight has amended how the qualifying graphics work, notes Ridout. She explains the reasoning and challenges behind this: “We’ve looked at a lot of other sports and how they deal with the qualifying side of things. The problem with the TT is it’s slightly unique; the top 20 bikes are already seeded, so although it’s called qualifying week, they used to call it practise week when they were going out to get laps which was indicative of what might happen in the race.

“But from an analysis point of view [because the top 20 bikes are already seeded], for the comms guys and the talent team it’s quite difficult in five consecutive sessions for them to talk about specifics. In previous years’ broadcasts we’ve used sector times [graphics] each time during the qualifying.

“The problem with that is they don’t go out in order; they can go out in any sporadic order and there’s combined qualifying sessions, so somebody might be out on a super bike and somebody might be out on a super stock, and that’s quite confusing to get across to the audience,” says Ridout. “So we’ve stripped that back to have a sort of standings overview, which will be the whole lap as it were for each of the classes. So hopefully it’s a bit more easy to understand who’s where.”

More understanding

Ridout says Greenlight has spent a lot of time working out what data in the event management system can best be translated into graphics to give viewers more understanding of what is going on in the races.

She says: “We’ve really looked at that and we got information from the event organisers about what the most popular page in their timing system is that’s viewed by the audience, then thought about how we can translate that onto the broadcast so that we’re providing pertinent information to give the viewers more information. So if [a viewer] tunes in during the middle of the qualifying session, they know immediately who’s where and who’s doing what. There’s been quite a lot of work in the background going on that.”

Ridout continues that finding the balance for the graphics between providing detail for casual viewers without talking down to hardcore fans was tricky.

She says: “That was one of the challenges of going live; trying to get information across. There’s the very knowledgeable audience, a very keen following of bike fans, and then there’s more of a casual audience who might not necessarily understand the nuances of the event and the time trial. So trying to tick the box to not patronise the viewers that know the sport really well and are massively passionate about it, but also to provide pertinent information to the viewers that are a bit more casual so that everybody understands what’s going on, but we’re also not patronising people at the same time.”

Watch the Isle of Man TT live on TT Live Pass from 26 May to 7 June 2025