Sky Sports is the host broadcaster for the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), and this season it chose to renew and refresh the way it uses graphics in the background of its production to enhance information sharing across all members of the crew, as well as for fans at home.
Bridget Bremner, Sky Sports’ head of production for cricket, says on Sky Sports’ focus on graphics in this first year of a four-year contract renewal with the ECB: “One of the things we looked at was Sky’s graphics that we’ve done for a very long time. We went out to tender with it, and Moov was successful in securing the graphics contract.”
Fruit machine
One of the main changes to Sky Sports’ ECB graphics package this season is to fruit machine, the software package that collates key statistics about the live game in real time for commentators and crew.
On how fruit machine works, Liz Thorne, Sky Sports’ senior production manager in the cricket team, explains: “We always have a scorer on site from our supplier, and now it’s Moov. They have quite an incredible job in terms of what they do on cricket, in that they mark what happens to every single ball. So the moment the ball becomes live, which is counted as when the bowler begins their runup, they mark exactly what happens, so who bowls it, where it lands on the pitch, who intercepts it, whether that be hitting it or it hits someone’s pads or it’s whacked for six into the crowd, and they say who’s caught it, where it’s ended up on the ground, those kind of things.
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“All that information is fed through into a software package that we call the fruit machine, because it’s very colourful because there’s a lot of information contained in there.”
“It’s a statistical representation of where we are in the game right now,” Thorne continues. “So, in order to find the information that the commentators need quickly or that any of us need quickly, a lot of it is colour coded. The person on site does all that information with their setup, and that has been working really well this year.”
Tailored access
This year, Moov tailored the fruit machine to enable easier visual access for commentators looking for details, and it has also created an even more tailored version to provide information during The Hundred matches, which require different details to Test matches.
Thorne says: “It makes our lives a lot easier and because we’ve redesigned the way that that interface works, it’s become a very much more bespoke fruit machine for us. The commentators and our content team really fed into how they want that to look and what they want it to look like on the screens that they’re seeing on. We’ve added a couple of little bits of other information, we’ve moved a few things around, but now it makes a lot more sense to them to be able to commentate.”
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“We’ve also completely redesigned it for The Hundred. Obviously The Hundred works in a very different way to traditional cricket,” Thorne continues. “We don’t have overs, we’ve sets, and the information that you’re looking for on The Hundred that the commentators are trying to convey to our viewers is different. It’s a different way of playing cricket; it’s much more accessible, it’s much more simplified. Our traditional fruit machine that’s really set up for a test match didn’t really show the correct information [for The Hundred], or rather, it did show the correct information, but it was difficult to access that information [quickly]. So now we’ve redesigned the interface of the fruit machine on The Hundred as well.”
There are essentially two versions of fruit machine: one is the locally produced fruit machine, “which is a really up to the minute, very fast version of that fruit machine,” says Thorne; and the other, “is a version that is sent back to Sky, and obviously within television there are slight delays, but the commentators are really pleased that they’ve got a really up to the minute, very fast fruit machine now”.
While the graphics are still delivered remotely, it is now done from Sky Studios. Bremner explains: “We are working within Sky Studios [with Moov], which was one of the big changes that we wanted to do across the board this season, just to reduce the additional remote locations, and that has proved beneficial. I think having graphics physically back in the gallery with the content team and with the director has really been good. Bringing that in place enables us to again bring the technologies together as well.”
Instant information
Fruit machine is used by everyone working on cricket, not just commentators. Says Thorne: “Everyone looks at it. I use it in the truck, I’ll be like, “oh, where are we just before we go into lunch, are we looking at a change of innings? Are we looking at sitting here for longer? What’s going to happen afterwards?” So we all learn to read it; the directors use it because they might need to understand where we are in the state of play, [to know] what they need to be showing to the viewer to tell the story of the game. They can read the fruit machine to say, “oh, there’s an interesting thing happening here,” or “there’s an interesting statistic here”.
Bremner adds that while every broadcaster that produces cricket will use a fruit machine, “I think being able to bespoke it a little bit more and work with the onscreen team to say, “how would you like to see it work, and what works where?” and then it becomes a reflex kind of memory when they’re working live to be able to look to a certain corner [to get specific details].”
Sky Sports works with lots of ECB rights holders from around the world on site at matches, and fruit machine is shared with them. “So Sony is getting that JioStar is getting that, the BBC get that, the big screen operators in the ground get the fruit machine, the umpires actually have the fruit machine in front of them as well. So it is something that is shared around the entirety of cricket,” says Thorne.
Fruit machine information also gets into onscreen graphics. Says Thorne: “There are two pieces of software working in the gallery at Sky; we call them computer and manual. So computer are graphics that are created by the fruit machine; they’re automated graphics. So when you pull up a batting card or a bowling card or a mini card which would show the information from the game, all that information is generated at the click of a button from the fruit machine.
“A manual graphic would be something that someone has typed in, that has had more specific detail in there, or a name strap or something like that,” Thorne continues. “Computer is very much run from the information that comes from the fruit machine. It’s really cool.”
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