John Ourand of Sports Business Daily does a great job of covering the business of sports media, among many other topics. He wrote a fascinating story earlier this week — non-paywalled — with a lot of interesting details about the trends and shifts taking place in sports television production, chiefly for the coverage of games.
You are encouraged to read the whole thing, but let’s provide the main highlights:
- Whereas an on-site production truck for a live sporting event might have typically had 12 people in the past, it will now be able to have only four or five. Ourand noted that this attempt to reduce the number of on-site staff had begun before the coronavirus pandemic, but that the pandemic has accelerated this shift in the sports production industry. Therefore, the idea that television requires a large number of people to be at the game site no longer applies — at least not on the scale it once did. TV can cover games and yet get out of the way at the same time, not being especially intrusive as a complicating factor. That’s huge. (Nothing was said in the article about remote game announcers, but we dealt with that topic here at Trojans Wire earlier this year, after the pandemic had arrived in the United States.)
- Fox Sports — a company which was born in 1994, in order to cover the NFL after replacing CBS as the NFC rights-holder — signed a deal to move all of its existing video content (25 years of archives) to Google Cloud.
Ourand gathered reaction to this second key story:
“This gets us closer to not being called a legacy media company,” said Brad Zager, Fox Sports’ executive producer and executive vice president/head of production and operations. “This will put us in position to evolve so much faster. We will be less reliant on brick-and-mortar physical resources.”
“If you’re a feature producer and you’re looking for content, you’ll be able to search on your phone for, say, an amazing shot of Tom Brady the same way that someone would search YouTube,” Zager said. “Everything is going to be accessible everywhere. This has been a year process.”
Long story short: If you were ever worried that the logistics of TV coverage for sporting events were a COVID-19 spread risk, or a complicating factor in terms of testing, tracing, or any of the other things the sports industry (pro or college) has to get a handle on in order to play a full season of games, you don’t need to worry anymore.
Television is nimble enough to produce games remotely, with a minimal on-site presence. That’s good news.
Whether it will be enough to save college football or allow for a full NFL season is another matter. On that score, we simply don’t know.