Live from Aintree: NEP and ITV Racing talk thoroughbred relationships

NEP provides ITV Racing with its Equinox OB truck for the National

ITV took over the contract for the UK’s terrestrial racing broadcasts from Channel 4 in 2017. This year marks the end of its second three-year deal with Racecourse Media Group (RMG) but it has already signed a third deal ending in 2026.

NEP had been providing racing for the BBC and Channel 4 for years so when ITV took over it was logical to turn to the same team to help them get up and running.

“There’s a lot of local knowledge among the crew that work on this event,” says Rob Oldham, tech producer at ITV Sport. “The core crew go around the different racecourses but none are the same and even when you go back to the same venue you’re not necessarily using the same infrastructure depending on the size of the event. All round it made a lot of sense to continue that relationship with NEP and its fantastic RF department.”

He adds: “NEP’s team are so good at what they do that from a technical point of view that I’m pretty calm during the races. The connectivity we use week in week out and there’s rarely any issues.”

For NEP, technical projects manager Jon Harris says: “The relationship between ITV Racing and NEP has been evolving since 2017. At the time they were a new broadcaster to the sport so we were able to share some of our experience and knowledge to help get them into the world of racing and develop the product to what is now.

“We’ve been challenged throughout all our work with ITV to bring in new technology, try new means of covering the racing and bring in new features to the show. It’s been good for our team to be tested and to try out some of this technology and see how it sits within broadcaster racing coverage.

“For this year we’ve started using AR. A lot of the show is very graphics based with lots of betting information and detail on the runners and riders, so AR brings a new dimension to the presentation and has really changed look of the show. We’ve been able to interface this with a number of specialist camera including wire cams and, hopefully, a drone.”

Mobile facilities

NEP provides ITV Racing with Equinox, a dedicated truck that facilitates racing for the broadcaster all year round. It’s scalable so can cater for everything from the smaller events to the giants like the National and is the main OB facility at Aintree.

This is supplemented with NEP Atlantic housing the gallery for the morning shows and also for the rerun. A third truck has an edit suite and desks for production management and the RF department. A fourth VT truck operates here as EVS positions.

“A lot of the show is very graphics based with lots of betting information and detail on the runners and riders, so AR brings a new dimension to the presentation and has really changed look of the show”

Fourteen EVS Via servers are all fully networked and interfaced into edit suites. Operators using these facilitate the three shows (the opening magazine-style show, afternoon live races and the rerun). Edits on site are predominantly for building closers or quick turnround edits. Most of the programme features are edited offsite with connectivity back to ITV Ealing.

Main output connectivity is via BT Fibre with a satellite uplink truck and a LiveU bonded cell backed up to the Starlink satellite network for disaster recovery.

Without the commercial imperative to do so, the National remains an HD affair (as does all ITV Racing coverage). This may change when ITVX begins streaming UHD.

“My personal preference is for High Frame Rate (HFR) HD rather than more pixels,” says Oldham. “1080 at 100Hz rather than UHD at 50. And I’d like to go HDR before 4K.”

Course familiarity

Harris, who has clocked up 13 consecutive Nationals, ten of them for NEP, also emphasises the importance of familiarity with the courses and course operators.

“We work on racing all year round but we only come to Aintree once a year, so the familiarity of the course needs refreshing each time we come back. Unlike Cheltenham or Ascot which we visit frequently, we don’t necessarily remember the location of every connectivity panel and the layout of course.

“I’d say from the operator’s point of view their focus is on the user experience of the 70,000 race goers, so for us that means there’s a lot more focus on how our camera platforms look, how the cabling is dressed, how we present our technical kit.”

John Harris: ‘With our relationships we’ve formed with the course owners over the years NEP will often get involved in consultation if they’re building a new grandstand, for instance’

Planning for the National evolves year on year and is now mostly adjustments rather than sitting down with a blank piece of paper. “We have a template for what we’ve done before and we’re now making adjustments to that,” adds Harris. “We start our production planning at the beginning of January with site visits.

“It’s a forever evolving space. With our relationships we’ve formed with the course owners over the years NEP will often get involved in consultation if they’re building a new grandstand, for instance.

“There are so many hospitality areas built for this event that can complicate matters. We have a series of cable ducts around the site that connects into our infrastructure in remote parts of the course. The hospitality units often get placed over the access panels so in February we come up to install and test cables before that temporary structure build. That means we need to know before then what the editorial production requirements are because they do vary year on year in terms of presentation positions, or features, or where RF cams should be.”

Production logistics

NEP has some 200 crew on site at Aintree this week. ACS alone has 25. All of this requires a lot of careful planning, not least because ITV Racing’s team and NEP kit and crew were providing coverage at Newcastle and Musselburgh the week before this and will head back to Scotland as soon as everything is de-rigged on Sunday.

“Ascot is a close second but in sheer production size and logistics the National is the biggest,” says Bridget Toomey, senior production manager, ITV Racing.

“Budgets are always very challenging and travel and accommodation has gone up. We’re always trying to secure the best deal including with hotels [which are in nearby Southport].”

Toomey was on site as part of the prep for Aintree in February, helping manage such things as the location of cranes and gantries for the wire cams.

“We then work with the producer and director on running orders and scripts. We are lucky to work here but every year it’s a challenge,” she says.

Toomey and team, including production manager Tess Keating, also works with pundits, analysis teams and the racecourse to identify celebrity guests to feature during the show. In keeping with ITV’s entertainment remit for racing, presenting duo Charlotte Hawkins and Mark Heyes have been at Aintree doing lifestyle and fashion features across the three days of the Grand National Festival.