Live from Budapest: World Athletics Productions head Alastair Waddington talks complexity and collaboration

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Friday, August 25, 2023 - 12:02
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The purpose-built National Athletics Centre stadium is hosting the spectacular that is the World Athletic Championships between 19 to 27 August in the heart of Budapest

Nestled on the banks of the Danube in the centre of Budapest, the purpose-built National Athletics Centre stadium is hosting the spectacular that is the World Athletic Championships between 19 to 27 August. This event is laying down the lines for the best athletes in the world to compete in Paris next year at the Olympics. Coverage of the Championships is produced by World Athletics Productions, a joint venture between the World Athletics governing body and ITN.

In the humid 34 degree heat of Budapest this week, SVG Europe spoke to director of ITN Sport and managing director of World Athletics Productions, Alastair Waddington, about the intricacies of running this massive broadcast in an air conditioned, beautifully constructed double story portacabin settled in the TV compound outside the stadium.

Stadium and Compound Fly Through

The foundations for what you see here were laid 12 months ago, when we sat in front of all the rights holders and said, “here are our production plans” at the World Broadcaster Meeting. We’d been coming here for some time before that to develop production and camera plans down to the last detail.

Servicing rights holders is a really, really important part of what we do. The product has got more and more sophisticated but also more and more end user friendly. So the old days of the host broadcaster putting their cameras up around the stadium and just shooting everything wide and then leaving it to the right holders to do their unilateral add-ons [are gone]. We’ve really focused on making that process as easy for the rights holders as possible.

There are a lot of rights holders here because of the time difference. European broadcasters are big supporters of athletics and the time zone in Doha and Oregon was much more challenging for them. And so as World Athletics is back in Europe, they’re here in numbers, and we just see it as our role to make their job as easy as possible. And the better we do – and the more they take of our content – the more we take that as a compliment.

Complicated sport

Producing athletics at this level is hugely complicated. There’s a lot going on in the stadium at the same time, and the competition timetable dictates how many galleries we need based on concurrency. So during the decathlon or the heptathlon there might be a whole lot of disciplines going on while there’s also main events on the track, which is why we have so many control rooms.

The marathons and race walks sort of take of themselves. It’s more of a traditional one-day OB. It’s two trucks up at Heroes’ Square. There’s a small compound, trucks, production office, and catering tent. Kind of separate, but very much part of the whole.

“Our job is to try and be something to everyone, and sometimes that’s quite a tough balancing act”

Down here [at the TV compound at the stadium] we have nine galleries and everything feeds into the integrated gallery, which produces the world feed. Everything on the track has its own gallery, and that’s directed by West Gillett, who you will know from Formula E and Xtreme E. He’s a specialist in directing sports which go around in circles quickly!

Then we have horizontal jumps, vertical jumps, shot puts and long throws, and [each of those has] an A and B gallery to cover both qualifying pools in those events.  Take the high jump for instance, there are two beds running simultaneously, and we have to cover them seamlessly as one event, although each has its own mini-OB.

Each control room has its own team; producer, a director, vision mixer, and then EVS operators. They operate as a team and they eat, live and drink as a team as well, so we try to put them together in the same hotel. We’re split across five hotels here, but you are always with your teammates. That works really well because they’re cohesive units, but also there’s a little bit of friendly competition between them too; one team gets a world record and everybody else wants a world record; of course they can’t do anything about it but it adds a little spice to the banter in the bar afterwards!

Alastair Waddington, director of ITN Sport and managing director of World Athletics Productions, hard at work in his office in the TV compound in Budapest

Feeding the machine

This all then feeds up into the integrated feed which is effectively an aggregator. The integrated feed can be broadcast as you if the rights holder is on site – you can take the whole thing and put it on TV straight away. It’s got commentary on it, English commentary. Some broadcasters sit across the integrated a lot and essentially put all our coverage to air.

Or, in some cases – NBC for instance – they cut their own show. They take all our feeds, they take them all back to Stanford, Connecticut, and they cut their own show in their remote gallery. Then it’s all points in between, really. Because of its remote production, NBC has a couple of commentators and a couple of people in the mix zone, and that’s it, whereas TBS have got 200 people here. Each broadcaster is in a different stage of their evolution towards remote production, and we try to cater for them all.

Because we run the feeds, we know that any broadcaster could take any feed at any time, so there’s no cameras upside down or people moving between [the camera and the athletes]; they’re all live the whole time.

The broadcasters make a decision before they get here about which feeds they’re going to take, and then in their own trucks or in their own cabins, cut their own shows. Depending on who they are [they have different focuses]; Japanese audiences for instance are hugely interested in the marathons and outside races, while the Nordics are all big fans of the discus and the javelin, and the 1500 metres.

We deliver all our signals into the TOC which then distributes them out to the broadcasters around the compound. They do whatever they do to it, it goes back into the TOC and then the EBU take their signals back to whichever country. All of the connectivity from here to the outside world is through Eurovision – all the distribution, whether that’s satellite, cable, whatever – it’s down to Eurovision. It’s quite complicated; it’s a matrix of activity.

NEP is the technical services provider for World Athletic Productions at the 2023 World Athletics Championships. Teams from the UK are on site at the stadium, and Germany at Hero’s Square for the marathons and race walks

Trucking along

NEP has no trucks here right now, but they’ve got six or eight trucks in the lorry park up the road, which brought all the kit, because we have a whole fly pack solution here. The whole lot comes over from Bracknell [UK], then they unpack it and put it in this building. The trucks left Bracknell on the 30 July, and got here about 2 August, and we got the compound handed to us on the 5 August. We had people out here just to have a look at when they dropped the cabins; there’s a lot of planning that goes into it and it’s a bit of a game of Tetris just to try to get all this stuff in. But I think we are probably all pleasantly surprised about how much space there is now. We thought it was going to be really, really tight on paper, but it’s been pretty good so far.

Kevin Orwin is NEP’s senior engineer and the project lead. We worked hand in glove with NEP for months and months and months to get to this point, and then you leave them to weave their technical wizardry.

This world is an interesting place because things have changed. In the old days you used to just plug up galleries one by one, and you go get done on the first gallery, that’s ready, let’s move on to the next. Now with IP, you’re building layers and layers and layers, and then at the end you go “bing!”, and they all fire up…  or don’t. And so the whole set up and rig feels completely different. I think that’s a learning because it’s all new to everyone which is just not the way we’ve always done it, and it’s just different.

The layers of complexity are quite large. We rely on our rig, obviously on cable riggers to a degree, but basically the key people in the rig now are programmers. The spine is a big router. We don’t have fibre running around the building anymore. We’ve still obviously got to run cables into the cameras in the stadium, but I look back at Doha [and there were] just masses of cable, piles of cable out the back here. You don’t have that anymore.

On the big screen in Hero’s Square, Budapest, fouls and disqualifications of the 35km marathon race walkers are graphically visualised for spectators and viewers at home on the broadcast

Graphical advance

We have two World Athletics partners for graphics and data. One is Seiko, who are the timing partner for all of the data relating to timing, measuring, everything else. And then their graphics partner is Deltatre. They both feed into our broadcast, and World Athletics is very integrated into the production. Sports presentation is a key part of putting athletics on in the stadium, because it’s complicated, it’s highly choreographed and its timing is important.

One of the things we did was join that up with our team, so the broadcasters and event presentation all have direct feeds of our gallery PA and Producer; it’s all synced, and feeding into that is Seiko and Deltatre.

We have Deltatre creating the graphics and we work in consultation from an editorial perspective on things like heat maps; we tell them what we want to try and illustrate, then Seiko tell them what data they’ve got available, and that all feeds into the design. We work very closely together. They’ll come up with ideas for graphics and we’ll say, “well I’m not sure that works editorially”, and we’ll come up with editorial ideas and they’ll say, “I’m not sure we can do that”, and that’s constantly evolving.

Our AR graphics are changing; they evolve every edition really, as technology comes and makes it easier. Audiences want more data. When KJT [British athlete Katarina Johnson-Thompson] won the heptathlon two days ago, there was quite a lot of Twitter activity about, and it was great watching the graphics that tell you where [she was in the competition]. In the heptathlon, in the final 800 metre race, they know how many points they’re going to have to score [to medal]. She had to finish within three seconds of the American to win. So you need to show how, as she’s running live, is she on target? Is she not? You’ve got this constant counter going of the points and their positions which were swapping in real time. Otherwise, you used to have to wait; you used to finish the 800 metres and they go work out the points to find out who won. You now know who’s winning as they cross the line.

Populating destinations

In terms of people, we have 400 people here, of which I would say approximately half are engineers of some description, or they’re either computer programmers, proper old fashioned TV engineers, sound assistants or whatever it happens to be, from our technical service partner NEP. Then we have a team of probably 20 or 30 people whose job it is just to service rights holders, so that includes the bookings office, the broadcast liaison offices, information officers. The information office probably sends out between 10-20 updates to rights holders per day from timetable changes to anything technical that they need to know, or running orders, etc.

Read more: Live From Budapest

All of that information is supported by two destinations. One is the digital media hub which does what it says on the tin; it’s a world athletics platform, which we then populate with openers, closers, scenics, fast turnaround highlights, interviews, and everything else [except live]. It’s basically a complete repository of assets which the rights holders can just go in and download at any point. We use it a lot pre-championships, because that’s where we put all the scenics of Budapest for instance. We produce all that content and we populate it. It’s run on a Veritone platform, and we used it first at Oregon.

That’s complimented by the rolling content feed, which is a live feed like the gallery feed. We’re constantly getting stuff up there, like athlete arrivals and quotes from the mix zone. So if broadcasters are in their trucks and control rooms, they can see this content coming in. We are giving rights holders every opportunity to [take advantage of a plethora of content].

What we’ve set out [to achieve] from the start is to focus on servicing the rights holders. World Athletics has 100-plus rights holders, so we focus very heavily on trying to give a really, really good service for rights holders. They pay a lot of money for their rights, and we turn up on site and we try to give them the best facilities to work in and the best pictures and the best output, and also the best customer service.

Always doing better

We’re always thinking about [what we could do better] as we go. One of the things we ask everybody to do is jot down stuff as they go, good, bad, ugly, just jot it all down, and then everybody takes a breath then we have a big review: What are the things that we could do differently? What are the things that we think work really well?

I’ll give you an example. In Doha we only had the daily briefings that everyone is invited to, and we’d have rights holders raising smaller operational issues like “Oh, and another thing, our toilets don’t work” and somebody else would say, “Well the parking’s terrible”. So I thought, ‘well there’s a way of cutting that out’, and so now as well as the daily briefing we go and personally visit each of them individually in the morning, have a cup of coffee, and ask, “what are the issues? Is everything okay?”

So that was a learning; it was a sort of little thing that you feel you could do better; it doesn’t affect the broadcasting in any shape or form, but it does affect the atmosphere. And we also just introduced other little things; we have a welcome drinks in the compound with the broadcasters when they all arrive on mass. All these trucks came in on one day and then they’re all a bit “first day of school term, where’s my locker?!”, so we have a briefing and then we gave them all a cold beer and a slice of pizza and they all get together and mix. We know all the broadcasters but they don’t necessarily know each other. It’s just a little thing but it helps make the compound a much more friendly place.

We are very collaborative [with the broadcasters on aspects such as graphic design and information]. After this championships, we’ll share a whole questionnaire with them, and we talk to them about, “What did you like, what you didn’t like, how can we improve?”. And the one thing you’re absolutely certain of, if we’ve got 30 broadcasters here in the compound, you’ll have 30 different views, from, “oh you didn’t focus on our athletes enough,” or, “you didn’t concentrate on the javelin enough,” or “you didn’t…”.

Our job is to try and be something to everyone, and sometimes that’s quite a tough balancing act.

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