Wimbledon 2024: NEP on managing the megalith that is Wimbledon Championships

Fletcher’s TR-ACE cameras ready to roll at Wimbledon this year

The focus on the Wimbledon Championships has now given way to the excitement of Olympic tennis, where we were able to share in the unmitigated glee of Andy Murray and his partner on the court, Dan Evans, beating the Belgians in the second round of the men’s doubles. However, a lot of work went into Wimbledon, and does every year for technical services provider, NEP, which works directly for host broadcaster Wimbledon Broadcast Services (WBS), as well as its own broadcast clients on the ground in south west London.

We caught up with Sam Broadfoot, NEP UK’s technical project manager, about how he ensures the Championship runs smoothly.

How many years has NEP worked for Wimbledon Broadcast Services for the Championship?

We’ve worked on The Championships since Wimbledon Broadcast Services was first established, which was 2018. We supplied facilities for the BBC beforehand when they were the host broadcaster.  I’ve personally worked here a long time, because I started out as a sound engineer; I used to guarantee trucks and fly packs.

I’ve been at Wimbledon working for NEP since 2001. I’ve worked on nearly every event since then, but I used to work a lot for American broadcasters rather than the host. 2020 would’ve been my first one with the host broadcaster, but unfortunately that was the one that never happened. Then, from 2021, I began working as the host technical project manager.

Inside the Wimbledon OB compound, featuring NEP’s OB trucks Venus, Ceres and Pacific. NEP’s hoist camera stands in the background

Please explain what you delivered this year.

We do the whole host operations, including the OB trucks for centre court and number one court. We provide all of the fly packs that broadcast every other court that’s shown. We manage Fletcher who are part of our NEP Group network in America, who provide all of the TR-ACE robotic cameras.

Read more Wimbledon 2024: NEP’s Sam Broadfoot talks challenges, control and crew

We cover all the rights holder distributions, so they can turn up on site wanting their feeds and we deliver to them; if you’ve been to the Olympics and other big events, you usually have to run to a TOC to collect your feeds. At Wimbledon, we do it in a different way. We will drop a node in the rooms that they are in and deliver what they request. That is more challenging work for us, but it results in higher efficiency as it means we don’t have lots of rights holders turning up with video and fibre kits that they need to put in our MCR.

It means that our MCR is massive, but it’s completely under our control. It’s swipe card access only, so we don’t have last minute people coming in.  If rights holding broadcasters (RHBs) want another feed, we can just put it on the node that’s already in that room. Obviously if they want another 50 feeds, it’s a slightly different question, but we can plan it in advance so we can get it up and running, so they turn up and the solution’s already in place. This makes things a lot easier and it makes the cable runs and the routes into the building neater because we’ve done it all in advance.

NEP at Wimbledon stats

• Cameras (Sony): Host 73, Clients 20 – Total 93
• EVS: Host 38, Clients 12 – Total 50
• Crew: Host 430, Clients 85 – Total 515
• Talkback panels: 150
• Cable: 90 kilometres-plus
• Remote cameras supplied to NEP by Aerial Camera Systems
• RF camera links supplied to NEP by EMG Connectivity

How long have you been doing the nodes for the right holder areas?

We’ve done that ever since WBS started. That was their plan; it was what they wanted. Prior to WBS becoming [the host broadcaster], we used to run all our cables in, have a day where you’d go in and you’d collect 150 feeds, and we were just one rights holder. Other companies were doing the same thing. So [WBS] looked at it and thought, “actually if we’re doing an IP solution, we can do it in a better way; we can make it better for everybody and it just keeps things a lot neater and easier”.

When does the hard work begin for NEP?

I turn up with the riggers six weeks before the Championships start. We begin installing our cabling, and it stays in for the duration of the Championships. We put in the best part of a hundred kilometres of cable each year.

For the internal building cabling, there’s a lot of fibres that stay already, but as every year changes, different rights holders move into different rooms and [therefore] what each room does changes; sometimes you need to put extra fibres in or put fibres into rooms that haven’t been used in this manner in previous Championships.

Then we have NEP’s Mediabank, for offsite media management. Any rights holder can get access to Mediabank and on there you can then collect any kind of footage that’s been made available; from highlights feeds, to press conferences, behind the scenes, and some archive footage.

At Wimbledon 2024, while the rain hammers down over London, the action is still captured by NEP crew and kit on Centre Court

Were there any changes this year in terms of what the rights holders wanted from you?

So this year there’s a lot more broadcasters taking feeds in HDR, which obviously takes more bandwidth in terms of the nodes. If everyone’s taking it in 50i, and now they’re taking it in 50p HDR, you double the bandwidth requirements. But because we work natively in HDR, we have less conversions to worry about.

At some point, I’m assuming everything will be 50p HDR. We still deliver some of the shows in 50i and we have to expect that at some point everyone’s going to want it in 50p HDR. Once the bigger RHBs move over [to 50p HDR], that could then just be the way. Two of the rights holders took everything in 50p HDR this year, which is great because it looks better.

What innovations did you bring in this year?

In terms of innovation, we’re always tweaking a few things, trying to find slightly better ways to make it work smoother for everybody. There are always little tweaks. Sometimes we try some new kit out; we’re always trying to make things better.

There’s not a big thing that we would say that we’ve done that’s dramatic this year, but we have done a bit more of what we were doing before. We’ve tried a few other devices here and there just to see how they integrate with our systems, and then you’re always thinking about the bigger picture.

Are there any particular technologies you’ve used to bring Wimbledon to viewers for 2024?

We have an NEP product – Total Facility Control (TFC) from NEP Australia – that allows us to manage IP routing. So we’ve used that a bit in the background, which means we can interface with more devices.

We use Cerebrum [EVS’ Cerebrum broadcast and monitoring system] as our control system. But we have TFC that sits in the background and can basically route between many other devices.