Live from Wimbledon 2023: Whisper serves up expanded Championships coverage for rights holders

The production teams at Whisper are used to working on high profile, global events, but Wimbledon is an event that has generated an entrirely new level of excitement and interest, says senior producer Harry Allen.

Whisper was appointed as Wimbledon Broadcast Services (WBS) production partner for The Championships for 2023 and 2024. The deal includes production of the world feed, international highlights, a creative preview film and an official film of The Championships. It has also provided the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) with the opportunity to overhaul the content it provides for broadcasters and shares via its own channels, resulting in the creation of a range of new strands of content for use across different platforms and formats.

Whisper at Wimbledon: led by senior producer Harry Allen (left) and creative digital lead Joe Bennett

“Everyone at Whisper who has worked on Wimbledon has said that they’ve never experienced the same level of interest,” says Allen.

“Right from when it was announced that Whisper would be broadcast partner, there’s been a reaction from friends, peers, talent – it’s just gone bonkers, even with internal members of staff who were desperate to work on it. It just cuts through.”

Whisper has been given a broader remit than its predecessor, which Allen describes as being useful to broadcasters for social channels as well as for broadcast.

“We do very traditional broadcast services; we do a world feed every day which is important, because if you’re a broadcaster that doesn’t have the resources to downlink eight court feeds every day, plus a studio to flip between them, you need something that you can use which curates the day’s play for you.

“We also do a quick turnaround world feed highlights show every night. Those are the bread and butter,” says Allen, who spoke with SVG Europe during the Championships.

“And then we do the Access All England feed which takes in all the remote cameras that are dotted around the grounds, including the players lawn and arrivals area.

“And what we’re doing with that is, again, just helping broadcasters so that they don’t have to sit across 20 remote cameras all day. We’ve got one person who’s cutting the most important and editorially relevant bits as an eight-hour feed from 9-5pm.

“Also, Aorangi Hour – presented from the Aorangi practice courts 12-1pm – is a branded show. We thought something that’s not really been done before is to be camped out in the practice courts, and it’s been amazing. It means we can have a really extended look at how the players are looking and really drill down into their performances as they practice.”

In addition to those main linear products, Whisper also has crews out shooting footage from around the Championships.

“We upload those rushes as soon as we get them in, and they’re made available for broadcasters, which can be really valuable,” says Allen.

“For example, we followed Christopher Eubanks on one day from start to finish, so if the BBC then has a sit-down interview with him, they can feel quite confident that what they’re going to get from us is all of the colour and the paint and the sound around it to make that into a really amazing feature. That means they can use their resources elsewhere to do other things…every day, we focus on finding the things that broadcasters will find useful.”

Feedback about what has proved popular is shared on a daily basis, both via data related to what broadcasters are downloading plus anecdotally. And, as part of that feedback loop, Whisper sends its own daily newsletter to broadcasters to keep them informed about what is being captured and made available.

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Allen estimates there are close to 70 people working for Whisper at the Championships, from loggers to camera operators, to sound production staff to producers.

“The main change compared to previous years is that we’ve stripped out the amount of live content we’re doing, which used to be a seven-hour presented show every day. We’ve condensed that down to an hour (Aorangi Hour). And we’re using, roughly speaking, that level of resource to gather material for broadcasters to make their offerings even stronger.

“A lot of us come from a hybrid background of broadcast and digital,” says Allen.

“Joe (Joe Bennett, creative digital lead – pictured above) comes at things more from the digital side, whereas I am more from the broadcast side, although we have both worked in both areas. The idea is that we’ve got two people exec producing who have a foot in both camps, so we understand the sensitivities of both worlds and what works for broadcast and what works for digital.”