It has been four years since the Sky Sports UK golf production team has been on US soil for a Ryder Cup. But, in that time, the team honed a remote production workflow for golf that was born in the pandemic and leverages not only an onsite presence but Production Control Room 8 back home in Osterley Park in West London.
“Our remote production has evolved since Whistling Straits [where the Ryder Cup was held in 2021],” says Jason Wessely, executive producer, Sky Sports Golf.
“And so has our collaboration with NBC Sports and the Golf Channel. PCR 8 is also bigger and more powerful than the gallery we had back in 2021.”
This year’s coverage will be delivered to viewers in the UK in UHD HDR for the first time, according to Katie Harrison, senior production manager, Sky Sports. The control room back home, Wessely adds, will be operating in 60i to eliminate a conversion step and maintain a purer signal.
Harrison and the team at Farmingdale, NY’s Bethpage Black, host of the 2025 Ryder Cup, will once again be working out of the Gravity Media TWiz production trailer, which provides a high-end oasis for talent when they aren’t on-air, commentary booths, and technical facilities that include audio mixing and signal transport to the UK.
Explains Harrison: “This week, we’re sending 32 vision feeds as well as the clean world feed and signals from our own three RF cameras. We have normal RF broadcast cameras as well as an xMO camera and a Sony FX6 camera on a gimble, and there are two cabled cameras that can be connected via drop locations on the course.”
Those unilateral cameras are important fixtures, especially because they provide a coverage option when there is a need to do bumpers or cut in and out of the world feed. A senior associate producer in the UK can look at the various feeds as well as at multiviews of replays or RF cameras and use 18 switchable paths to pull them from the router inside the TWiz trailer.
Sky Sports coverage teed off this morning at 9am UK time or 4am Bethpage Black time. Wessely says that provides three hours of buildup, with the first two hours from the Sky Studios in Osterley Park and then live from Bethpage Black at 6am, just as the sun is starting to rise ahead of the action.
“The studio will have presenters and guests as well as a touchscreen, AR pairings, the holes in 3D, and lots of great content,” he adds. “Then we transition to our studio here on the first tee box, and we share that with the Golf Channel. That allows the audience back home to feel part of that first-tee atmosphere.”
A big change this year is that NBC Sports Lead Golf Producer Tommy Roy will be producing the world feed, which will be the backbone of both Sky Sports and NBC Sports coverage. Previously the world feed was created using the NBC feed with the world feed production team cutting around various NBC-specific elements.
“Tommy can now produce to his heart’s content, and we will get a consistent product as ETP [European Tour Productions] is in the world-feed truck advising and communicating to the international broadcast partners,” explains Wessely. “It’s a much more efficient way of doing things and will also be more effective.”
For golf production, the remote-production workflow that Sky Sports has developed has proven itself not only at Ryder Cups but at other major golf championships (most notably, the Open Championship). Wessely says the challenge is communication with the main gallery at Sky Sports.
“It’s communication not only during the show but during the build-up and organising,” he adds.
“We’ve had weekly meetings and monthly meetings to go through everything, and we now have daily meetings to make sure everyone’s connected and everyone knows what they’re doing. When everyone’s onsite, it’s easy, as you bump into people and have face-to-face contact. But, when we’re working in two different time zones, you need to be on top of it. I still think we’ve got a way to improve but are better than we were before in terms of getting everyone aligned on both sides of the Atlantic.”
