STAMFORD, Conn.—NBC Sports is mounting mics in unconventional places to bring the sounds of NASCAR into the living rooms of sports fans.

Whether affixed to the front of a bump on a rear quarter panel or even directly inside a driver’s helmet, DPA Microphones’ powerful 4062 Omnidirectional Miniature Lavaliers have proven to be a “game-changer,” not simply a novelty, when it comes to telling the story of a race, said Matt Hogencamp, director of remote technical operations for motorsports at NBC Sports.

“In NASCAR, grams matter, and race cars generate brutal wind speeds, punishing vibration, extreme temperature shifts and showers of track debris,” he said. “We needed mics that were small enough to hide, light enough to avoid affecting aerodynamics and strong enough to survive extreme conditions lap after lap, while still delivering top-tier audio. The 4062 checked every box and gave us a real leg up in the sound department. Now, fans can hear the gritty scrape of a car skidding along the wall without crashing or the vacuum of ‘dirty air’ when one car tucks in behind another, the sound vanishing into eerie silence.”

While new camera angles and visuals are regularly incorporated into productions, audio is just as important, Hogencamp said.

“When we put a mic under the hood, our viewers can hear the engine in a way that changes how they experience the race,” he said. “It’s like they are in the car themselves. Even more revealing, viewers can now catch a driver’s unfiltered thoughts mid-race—the adrenaline-laced monologue they usually have on their own, as they hurtle toward a 200-mile-per-hour turn. These mics nearly disappear into the car but still capture everything we want.”

The microphones perform consistently regardless of where they are placed, which reduces postproduction fixes and allows engineers to focus on the dozens of other live feeds streaming into the truck, Hogencamp said.

“Durability is another win,” he said. “During multiday events, where crews have little time for repairs, the DPA mics kept running, meaning we had fewer midrace swaps and less risk of losing key audio moments. Quick mounting and low maintenance also made life easier in the high-pressure environment of race day, where every second of setup time is precious.”

For NBC Sports, the future of NASCAR broadcasting lies in this blend of technical ingenuity and creative risk-taking. With DPA on board, Hogencamp expresses confidence the audio side of the sport will only get more immersive.

“We’re always looking for new ways to put viewers closer to the action,” he said. “With DPA, we’re not just showing them the race—we’re letting them feel it.”

More information is available on the company’s website.

NEW YORK—Prime Video has released some of its tech plans for the NASCAR Cup Series, which begins on Sunday, May 25 at 5 p.m. ET with the Coca-Cola 600 from Charlotte Motor Speedway.

As part of its coverage of five consecutive races, including the series’ first-ever international points event in Mexico City, Prime Video will use 70-plus cameras, provide real-time highlights on demand, offer a 1080p HDR feed and provide coverage of every green flag moment during the races.

More specifically, the streamer said it would offer:

• Double-Box Commercial Format. Every Prime Video race will feature end-to-end live coverage of green flag racing with a double-box commercial format, ensuring that viewers never miss a moment of action.
• Key Moments. Prime Video will leverage real-time data to offer viewers race highlights and every flag change on demand while watching NASCAR on Prime. A bank of pivotal moments will build as the race progresses, offering viewers immediate access to these key moments.
• Rapid Recap. This feature is designed to help those who join the race in-progress and want to catch up on the action they missed before entering the livestream. Rapid Recap employs real-time data to compile highlights, with the full recap lasting no longer than two minutes. Once caught up, fans are automatically dropped into live action.
• Robust Equipment Arsenal to Capture all the Action. Prime Video will deploy 70-plus cameras at each race, including in-car and POV cameras with mics, all connected by up to 10 miles of fiber optic cable. A drone will also patrol the sky at select races to capture unique angles and the high-octane atmosphere of the track.
• Premium Viewing Experience and Next-Generation Productions. Each race will be produced in 1080p native High Dynamic Range (HDR) with Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound.
• Proprietary Ultra-Low-Latency Technology. Prime Video and AWS technology will be using a proprietary, end-to-end livestreaming solution that delivers ultra-low latency, eliminates drift and ensures synchronization. Prime Video said it offers delivery speeds that match and often surpass what fans receive from traditional cable and broadcast networks.

In addition, Prime Video will offer wraparound booth and trackside coverage headlined by NASCAR Hall of Famers Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Carl Edwards and a signature new anthem from Eric Church and John Fogerty.

BURBANK, Calif.—NASCAR and The CW Network are reporting that the Saturday, Feb. 15 2025 NASCAR Xfinity Series season opener at Daytona on The CW delivered the largest audience for any Xfinity Series race in almost three years, with 1.8 million total viewers, according to Nielsen fast national ratings.

The race ranked as the most-viewed Xfinity Series season opener at Daytona since 2020 and the most-watched Xfinity Series race since Talladega in April 2022, The CW said.

Viewership peaked at 2.2 million total viewers in the 7:30 p.m. ET quarter hour for the race, which saw Jesse Love cross the finish line first at the legendary Daytona International Speedway.

Compared to last year’s NASCAR Xfinity Series weather impacted opener at Daytona, viewership was up 93% in total viewers and rose by double digit percentages across key demos including +76% in adults 18- 49 (330,000) and +47% in adults 25-54 (444,000).

Viewership was also up double-digit percentages compared to The CW’s final playoff race last year from Phoenix in total viewers (+62%), adults 18-49 (+74%) and adults 25-54 (+78%).

DAYTONA, Fla.—The Fox Sports production of this year’s Daytona 500 will see the addition of a few new tech elements and the continued unfolding of the broadcaster’s quest to realize additional workflow efficiencies while enhancing quality.

(The Daytona 500 begins Sunday, Feb. 16, at 2:30 p.m. EST. It will be broadcast live on Fox and the Fox Sports app. Live streamers can watch via YouTube TV, Sling TV, Hulu + Live TV and Fubo.)

As it did during the Super Bowl on Feb. 9, Fox Sports will introduce Cosm super-wide-angle cameras into its race coverage, working with the entertainment dome experience specialist on where best to place them around the 2.5-mile track. The broadcaster, which also plans to add a heavy-lift drone with a full-size camera and lens, will rely on new optically generated tracking data from NASCAR to drive its SportsMEDIA Technology (SMT) graphics, Michael Davies, executive vice president of technical and field operations at Fox Sports, said.

This Sunday’s race, the first time Fox Sports will cover the Daytona 500 under a new seven-year contract with NASCAR, “doesn’t change that much in what we put on air,” Davies said. It does mark the beginning of a new chapter that will see Fox Sports, NBC Sports, Amazon Prime Video and TNT Sports carry all 38 NASCAR Cup Series races through 2031. (The Feb. 2 Busch Light Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is regarded as a preseason race.)

The deal divides distribution among the entities. “On any given weekend, you’re going to have Fox on [NASCAR] Cup; Amazon on practice and qualifying; The CW Network on the Xfinity race; and [TNT Sports] doing the in-cars,” Davies said. (Fox Sports and NBC Sports will each carry 14 NASCAR Cup Series races. Prime Video and TNT will split the 10 remaining midseason races.)

Fox Sports, which will produce its coverage in 1080p high dynamic range (HDR), in some instances will produce the shows for other networks and in others will hand off various feeds. “In a raw technological sense, it really doesn’t make a lot of difference when you are sitting in the truck and actually producing the show,” Davies said. “It’s really just the downstream proliferation of everything that’s going to be different.”

The Spectacle
The Daytona 500 is considered a spectacle because it’s the biggest race in NASCAR with fans and dignitaries, such as former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, often in attendance. “If you look online, President [Donald] Trump may or may not be at this one as well,” Davies said.

Regardless, Fox Sports will treat the production like a spectacle, erecting a stage just as it does for the Indianapolis 500 and Super Bowl. “Daytona commands a real pregame presence that we don’t do for other races,” he said. “You’ve got the grand marshal, the national anthem and the flyover. It’s a big buildup, not unlike the Super Bowl. We won’t do six and a half hours of pregame programming like the Super Bowl, but we’re doing quite a bit with our own stage and crew focused on pregame.”

Newly added Cosm cameras will help the broadcaster capture that spectacle for viewers. Unlike at the Super Bowl, the super-wide angle of the cameras’ shots may not simply be used after being de-warped and selecting a 16-by-9 area of interest for TV viewers, Davies said.

“Maybe some of these cameras look good as they are. I think this is just one of those wait-and-see items. We might be able to use them in a couple of ways,” Davies said during an interview conducted midweek before the race.

One of the ways he is considering taking advantage of the cameras’ wide viewpoint is to capture as many as six or seven pits in the same shot. While the broadcaster normally uses a traditional broadcast camera with a wide-angle lens to capture pit stops, the extra-wide angle of the Cosm camera’s viewpoint will enable the broadcaster to capture more, he said.

“One of the things I like about working with those guys is it’s never a totally separate production [one for Fox and one for presentation at a Cosm Dome in Dallas and Los Angeles],” Davies said. “There’s always the middle of a Venn diagram—the crossover—where both of us can enjoy what we’re putting out.”

The heavy-lift drone, another new addition, will complement the FPV and other drones deployed to cover the race. “We’ve done it before on some races, but we’re going to employ the heavy-lift drone with a big-boy camera and real lens at Daytona to get additional coverage that adds into the fact that this is a bigger race,” he said.

One significant technical change viewers will not notice on-air is NASCAR’s use of a new system based largely on optical technology rather than GPS to gather accurate tracking data for Fox Broadcast graphics. “We’re still going to use the SMT to render those graphics, but under the hood is something completely different,” he said.

Production Efficiencies
For this year’s “Great American Race,” Fox Sports has rolled eight trucks to the Daytona International Speedway, fewer than in the past and a continuation of a downward trend, Davies said.

“Ten years ago, there were 10 additional trucks in the compound to do, roughly speaking, what is happening now,” Davies said, adding that ESPN was also involved at the time.

“It was a massive compound,” he said.” You had the shared resources and RF trucks right in the middle. Then on one side you had ESPN land and on the other side Fox land,” pointing out that those shows were produced in 720p, not 1080p as will be done this year.

The point, however, isn’t simply to reduce the expense of on-site production trailers, but also to streamline workflows and save on the expense of certain personnel, who can work remotely on race coverage.

“I’ll give you several instances [of remote personnel working on the production],” he said. “We have replay people working both in Pittsburgh and in California. We have some graphics people in Pittsburgh. We also have racing radio editors and producers who work from their homes. And we have our race editor working from home as well.”

An edit room equals about one-quarter of a production trailer. The space needed to edit racing radio takes up another quarter. These and other reductions begin to add up and enable the broadcaster to remove entire trailers or downsize to a smaller vehicle, as Fox Sports is doing this year by replacing a trailer dedicated to graphics with its remote personnel and those working in the van devoted to SportsMEDIA Technology graphics, Davies said.

Among the biggest reasons Fox Sports has been able to reduce how many OB vehicles it sends to produce races is the availability of fiber-optic connectivity at NASCAR tracks, eliminating latency concerns, he said.

“[For a time], not all [the tracks] were fiber,” he said. “But we spent some money and got them all fiber. Obviously, we’re now reaping the gains from that.”

ATLANTA—TNT Sports is launching a new NASCAR Driver Cam experience exclusively on Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max streaming service that will offer motorsports fans in-car HD visuals, audio, replays and a wide variety of data and other information.

Launching with the Cook Out Clash at Bowman Gray this Sunday, Feb. 2, NASCAR Driver Cam on Max will offer users the most comprehensive access inside each driver’s car on up to 40 drivers each race. It will feature a layered audio mix of scanner team radios and ambient car noise, all synced up with a 1080p Driver Cam feed on supported devices.

At launch, fans will be able to choose between individual Driver Cams or two pre-set Multiview stream options featuring four drivers each, chosen based on the most compelling matchups and storylines each week.

B/R Racing’s X and Instagram platforms will also run a weekly poll for fans to vote on the four drivers to be featured in a special “Fan Selected” Multiview stream on Max.

The new feature is part of a new seven-year multimedia rights agreement between TNT Sports and NASCAR. Additionally, truTV and Max will exclusively present the second half of the NASCAR Cup Series practices and qualifying sessions each season.

The new agreement also includes expansive highlights rights for Bleacher Report’s digital and social platforms, including B/R Racing as a dedicated content destination for NASCAR fans. The deal continues TNT Sports’ 32-year relationship with NASCAR, a collaboration that began in 1983.

In terms of the new in-car experience, each individual driver stream will have integrated live stats—stage, lap number, position and race status—along with telemetry data including speed, RPM, gear, and more. Users will be able to pause, rewind and fast forward live video as well, and a replay of each individual driver stream will be available following each race.

On race days, the NASCAR Driver Cams along with the featured and fan-selected Multiviews will all be available to stream within the B/R Sports section on Max. Users can find all NASCAR Driver Cam on Max live content on the upcoming schedule here.

NASCAR Driver Cam on Max will be available for all drivers across all 38 race weekends of the NASCAR Cup Series schedule, including the Daytona 500, all seeding races for and each race of the inaugural NASCAR In-Season Tournament and the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs.

TNT Sports’ networks will exclusively present the inaugural in-season tournament, starting with Atlanta’s Night Race on Saturday, June 28, followed by four consecutive Sundays of adrenaline-pumping race action: July 6 in Chicago; July 13 in Sonoma; July 20 in Dover; and July 27 in Indianapolis. All races will also simulcast on Max.

Samsung, a new NASCAR technology partner, will provide digital displays to elevate the stock-car racing circuit’s fan experience, racing operations and enterprise processes, the company said today.

The multiyear partnership will begin with the introduction of Samsung displays and monitors for NASCAR Productions’ newly launched remote race control room, Samsung said.

Housed in NASCAR’s 58,000-square-foot production facility in Concord, North Carolina, the control room features Samsung’s The Wall as its centerpiece, allowing officials to review comprehensive, real-time video, audio and data from the track and remotely officiate races. The Wall spans 32 feet in width and 9 feet in height, NASCAR said.

The new control room will enable NASCAR to remotely officiate large-scale races nationwide in a precise, data-driven way. During races, as many as 24 officials in the room will use The Wall as their primary screen to access replays from the SBG Sports Software system, which is capable of aggregating up to 200 camera angles, all driver audio and voice-to-text transcription of team radio transmissions, it said.

The Wall’s true-to-life picture quality will deliver footage and data with the finest level of detail, presenting crisp, clear information to remote officials so they can confidently make decisions on penalties and race results.

“Our indoor LED displays and monitors will help NASCAR fuel a new era of race-day precision from the first lap to the final stretch,” David Phelps, head of the display division at Samsung Electronics America, said.

“With superior visuals and real-time data, officials will experience unmatched clarity and insight into every moment of each race—offering a level of visibility that surpasses what they could see on-site at the track. This is just the beginning of our partnership as we help to pave the future of motorsports.”

Officials in Concord will remain fully immersed in the racing action via live feeds and intercom communications to consult with their counterparts at the track.

The Wall’s large-scale display provides officials with a real-time view of information as drivers make their laps and pit stops. The screen will display a variety of data, including feeds from onboard cameras, Engine Control Units (ECUs), optical tracking cameras, Pit Road Officiating (PRO) systems and official cameras positioned at the pit, start and finish lines, restart zones and other key locations, the company said.

Officials will use a range of Samsung monitors to gather and analyze insights, including 25 27-inch ViewFinity S6 high-resolution monitors and seven 49-inch Odyssey G9 monitors. The ultra-wide, curved Odyssey G9 monitors offer extensive screen real estate where officials can simultaneously view and assess multiple data sources, enhancing their ability to support track operations, it said.

“Remote Race Control will give NASCAR officials unparalleled views of more than 200 camera angles with multiple data points from every car that were previously not available,” Steve Stum, NASCAR vice president of operations and technical production, said. “It will also allow us to make competition calls faster and more accurately than ever before to ultimately help improve the product.”

The remote race control room will be fully operational and revved up to support this year’s NASCAR Cup Series, which kicks off with the Cook Out Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium on Sunday, Feb. 2.

More information is available on the company’s website.

PITTSBURGH—NEP Group has announced a notable expansion of its connected production ecosystem with new facilities and new partnerships with rights holders, sports leagues, broadcasters and OTT providers.  

The expansion is built on technologies and solutions that will be on display at the 2024 NAB Show by NEP executives between April 13 and 17 in Las Vegas. 

In addition to existing partnerships around the globe, NEP reported that the expanded connected production ecosystem is now providing support for such partners as the PGA Tour, NASCAR and MLS in the United States, Dyn Sport in Germany, WRC in Finland, TV4 and the Swedish Hockey League in Sweden, and the International Press Center – Résidence Palace in Brussels, Belgium. 

The expansion includes the new fleet of nine all-IP mobile units that debuted for the 2024 PGA Tour season.

The connected production solutions offered by NEP now include over 20 production hubs, 100 control rooms, 200 mobile units, and 100 flypacks worldwide that NEP said allows it to offer various production options and services tailored to individual needs and comprehensive solutions from content capture to distribution. 

The ecosystem, powered by NEP’s Total Facility Control (TFC) platform, enables seamless operation and collaboration across NEP’s global network of facilities and hubs.

The key expansions over the last year includes bringing nine new production hubs into North America, APAC and Europe, a new hub in Singapore, and expanding the Andrews Hubs in Australia and the VISTA Hub in South Florida. NEP created its global ecosystem to allow for any combination of traditional production deliveries, at one or multiple event venues, with remote capabilities managed off-site, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles away.

“Our connected production solutions are complementary to NEP’s industry-leading fleet of mobile units and OBs, and our recent partnerships are great examples of this hybrid approach of serving our clients both onsite and remotely,” explained Mike Werteen, president, NEP Americas and global chief commercial officer. “From the new fleet of nine all-IP mobile units that debuted for the 2024 PGA TOUR season, to the connected production hubs established around the globe – we’re providing our clients with more production tools and flexibility to meet their needs, and we’re honored to collaborate with their amazing teams to build the best production solutions for today and the future.”

The solutions are built on NEP’s proprietary broadcast control and networking platform, TFC. It makes using IP 2110 infrastructure fast and intuitive and it empowers production teams to focus on creating incredible content instead of integrating disparate technologies. TFC is used throughout NEP’s connected production facilities across the globe, giving production, video, audio, replay, graphics and engineering operators the ability to program show setups using a touchscreen, scale setups up and down, and share resources between any other facility within NEP’s connected production ecosystem, providing universal control, management and security.

NEP also reported that its technical and commercial staff will be on hand at the 2024 NAB Show, at the Las Vegas Convention Center from April 14-17, 2024. 

Staff will be available by appointment in both private and semi-private meeting spaces in the North Hall. 

NEP’s presence at the 2024 NAB Show also includes expert panel appearances, featuring: Geert Thoelen, Director of Technology, NEP Belgium, Scott Rothenberg, SVP, Technology & Capital Planning, Cameron O’Neill, NEP Japan Country Manager, Ryan Jones, Director, Systems Integration, and Dan Murphy, VP, Product Management. 

For more information on connecting with NEP at NAB, visit NEP’s 2024 NAB Show page. 

DAYTONA BEACH, Florida—New NASCAR sports rights deals with Amazon’s Prime Video and Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNT Sports will see more sports available on streaming media in 2025.  

In addition to the new deals with Prime Video and TNT, Fox and NBC also renewed their deals with NASCAR. They will continue to carry the majority of races, with 14 events on each broadcaster. 

Under the new seven-year media rights agreement, beginning in 2025, Prime Video will be the exclusive home of five NASCAR Cup Series races in the early summer. NASCAR joins the growing Prime Video catalog of top tier live sports in the U.S.

Starting in 2025, TNT Sports will return to covering NASCAR as the exclusive home to five NASCAR Cup Series races each Summer, airing in consecutive weeks on TNT and B/R Sports Add-On on Max. Additionally, truTV and Max will exclusively simulcast the second half of the NASCAR Cup Series practices and qualifying sessions each season.

“We’re thrilled to bring the excitement and power of NASCAR to our Prime members, with five Cup Series races coming to Prime Video each season, starting in 2025,” said Jay Marine, vice president and global head of sports, Prime Video. “NASCAR Cup Series racing is an iconic American tradition, and it will be a sensational addition to the lineup of premium live sports on Prime Video.”

"With their compelling innovations in streaming multiple live feeds and data-driven insights, Prime Video has quickly become a staple in the homes of millions of consumers and sports fans throughout the country, including many NASCAR fans," said NASCAR president Steve Phelps. "We are thrilled to pair our proven ability to bring a large-scale audience of passionate fans with Prime Video's potential to introduce our sport to new viewers utilizing their unique platform beginning in 2025.” 

As part of the TNT Sports agreement, the new deal will also include expansive digital rights for content streaming via the B/R Sports Add-On on the Max streaming service — allowing for the full use of new technologies to develop immersive viewing experiences — and highlight rights for Bleacher Report’s digital and social platforms, the companies said. 

“We are thrilled to welcome NASCAR back to TNT Sports, and build on our rich, shared history of providing immersive fan experiences that only our world-class team can deliver,” said Luis Silberwasser, chairman and CEO, Warner Bros. Discovery Sports. “This agreement expands our portfolio of premium sports content throughout the Summer and further elevates Max and our leading linear networks. We look forward to utilizing all of our resources to create new opportunities for compelling storytelling that connects with our fans, as we present the thrilling action and excitement on the track in innovative ways throughout the entire NASCAR season.”

“TNT Sports has a premium live sports portfolio with proven, high-quality distribution to millions of sports fans across both cable television and now direct-to-consumer with the exciting opportunities to innovate on Max," said NASCAR president, Steve Phelps. "We are thrilled to reunite with their talented team to bring America’s leading motorsport back to TNT Sports as a key pillar of their live sports programming mix in 2025.”

This will mark the continuation of TNT Sports’ 32-year relationship with NASCAR, a collaboration that began in 1983 and one that has been centered on innovation and creativity that was instrumental to the growth of the sport.

BURBANK, Calif.—Nexstar’s The CW Network continues to expand its sports programming lineup with a new deal for rights to be the exclusive broadcasters for the NASCAR Xfinity Series.

The deal begins in 2025 and extends through the 2031 racing season, during which The CW will broadcast 33 live NASCAR Xfinity Series races annually, along with practice and qualifying events each weekend. 

The deal offers another example of sports rights moving to broadcast as rights holders look to maximize audience reach at a time of declining pay TV subs. 

Starting in 2025, for the first time in series history, every NASCAR Xfinity Series race will be available on free, over-the-air broadcast television with additional content available through The CW’s digital platforms. 

“Landing the NASCAR Xfinity Series is a game changer for The CW and our CW Sports division and represents another important building block in our programming strategy,” said Dennis Miller, President of The CW. “Live sports are the most watched television content and with The CW’s national reach, moving NASCAR Xfinity Series to The CW will transform and elevate the viewing experience for the series and its fans. The CW has quickly become a destination for sports, as the NASCAR Xfinity Series joins our growing slate of sports programming, including INSIDE THE NFL, ACC college football and basketball, LIV Golf, and the motorsports documentary series 100 DAYS TO INDY. Beginning in 2025, The CW will have 48 weekends per year of live sports programming. With ubiquitous distribution across one of the nation’s five major broadcast networks, NASCAR Xfinity Series races on The CW will deliver more access for fans and far more revenue opportunities for The CW and its affiliates.”

All NASCAR Xfinity Series races and ancillary content will be fully produced by the Emmy Award-winning NASCAR Productions group, in close collaboration with The CW Network.

The NASCAR Xfinity Series primarily features NASCAR’s younger, up-and-coming drivers, with the sport’s future stars often competing side-by-side against NASCAR’s biggest names – many of whom earned their stripes and won championships in the Xfinity Series. 

NASCAR Xfinity Series races in some of the nation’s largest markets—from Chicago to Los Angeles to Miami—and at the sport’s most iconic tracks, including the Daytona International Speedway, Talladega Superspeedway and the series championship at Phoenix Raceway.

NASCAR Xfinity Series races draw an average of approximately 1 million viewers per race each season. 

It historically aired on a combination of cable and broadcast television, but will now be entirely and exclusively distributed on broadcast television. 

DAYTONA, Fla.–Fox Sports, NASCAR and Racing Force Group have inked a deal to use the leading-edge Driver's Eye micro-camera POV technology for the NASCAR Cup Series events aired by Fox Sports. The racing league began using the helmet camera tech during its biggest annual event, the Daytona 500 over the weekend. 

Racing Force Group says its Driver's Eye is the first and only FIA homologated micro camera in the world that can be integrated inside a racing helmet, and the world's most compact camera for live broadcasting: this gives the audience an exact view of what the drivers see in the car during the race. In its latest spec, the camera achieved an impressive size of 0.35x0.35 inches and a weight of 0.003 pounds, according to the company.

The NASCAR deal follows a similar announcement from Formula 1 last month to deploy the POV cameras for the upcoming 2023 Grand Prix season. 

Adopting the camera tech is part of NASCAR’s campaign to increase viewership, which had been on the decline in recent years. However in 2022, 3,696,000 viewers on average watched the NASCAR Cup Series events broadcast on Fox and FS1 channels, and across the entire 2022 season, viewership was up 4% and household share was up 10% year-over-year.

Fox Sports' portion of the 2023 season will end with the coverage of the Toyota/Save Mart 350 event at Sonoma Raceway on Sunday, June 11.

"This agreement is yet another landmark for the growth of the Driver's Eye technology in the car racing industry," said Alexandros Miotto Haristos, COO of Racing Force Group in Italy. "Few brands in motorsports are as popular as NASCAR, even outside the United States, and this three-axis partnership with NASCAR Cup Series and Fox is a further proof about our product's quality. We thank both NASCAR and Fox for trusting our system, which is already adopted by other top championships. 

"Moreover, Racing Force Group can strengthen its prestige across the American market, where it is already playing a leading role through all its brands, plus an expansion project in place."

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.—Fox Sports will deploy XtraMotion, its super slow-motion interpolation technology co-developed with EVS, on prem for the first time during a NASCAR race Sunday, Feb. 19 for its coverage of the Daytona 500.

(Coverage of the Daytona 500, aka "The Great American Race," begins on Fox and Fox Deportes at 2:30 p.m. EST. Coverage is also available on the Fox Sports app, Hulu + Live TV, Sling TV and fuboTV.)

First deployed for the race in 2021, XtraMotion processing at that time was done offsite in the AWS Cloud where a theoretically limitless number of CPUs and GPUs created new video between frames shot at normal speed to synthesize slow motion. XtraMotion, in essence, turned every camera into a super slow-motion camera.

The downside, however, was depending on the cloud to interpolate the frames remotely. The distance introduced latency that required the broadcaster to be judicious about how it integrated XtraMotion footage into its coverage. 

Stoppages in the race due to crashes, for example, gave Fox Sports the time needed—as much as five minutes—to generate the synthesized super slow-motion footage and have it ready to insert into the production. Having XtraMotion processing available in a rack-mounted device on-site changes that.

“What's cool about having XtraMotion processing on site is that, when something happens, you send video to the XtraMotion processor, and then it turns back up in your EVS playlist as a 3x super motion clip, and it does that in five seconds,” says Michael Davies, senior vice president of field and technical operations, at Fox Sports.

Generating XtraMotion on prem also enables the system to treat incoming source video as a “growing clip,” which means there’s effectively no limit to the length of the super slow-motion interpolated segment.  

“It’s going to be amazing for in-car [cameras] because obviously we can’t do in-cars as super motion,” he says. “I’m really looking forward to seeing how often it gets used because of how quick the turnaround is.”

Helmet Cams
The Great American Race will also see the first use of video cameras integrated directly into the helmets of drivers to give viewers a driver’s eye view of the race rather than relying on vizor helmet cameras that were temporarily attached to the head protection, he says.

“Racing Force is the company behind Bell Helmets, and they have the knowledge to execute the integration of the cameras,” says Davies.

Fox Sports, which will shoot the Daytona 500 in 1080p HDR, will rely on an extensive complement of cameras (see Camera Map), including several drone cameras from Beverly Hills Aerials. 

“Beverly Hills Aerials, which we have worked with in the past, brings several different types of airships, each used for a different purpose,” says Davies.

Those include the small, lightweight Hummingbird drone that can fly around people with their permission, the FPV high-speed drone used in NASCAR straightaways due to its speed and a heavy-lift drone.

“The heavy-lift drone is a big, multiple rotor aircraft with a stabilized camera—a real 60- to 70-pound camera,” says Davies. 

Davies draws a distinction between how drones are used in race coverage when compared to other sports. “The interesting thing about racing is that unlike stick-and-ball sports where drones are basically used to generate glorified feature beauty shots, auto racing can actually use drones to as actual coverage cameras,” he says. 

The difference is the size and setup of the raceway, which makes it possible to fly the drones along large, unpopulated corridors to capture race footage without flying over people, says Davies, who adds that every year the industry is achieving more trust among regulators at the FAA by demonstrating drones can be used safely even when thousands of people are nearby in the stands.

Can You Hear Me Now?
Radios in NASCAR that let fans hear the drivers are nothing new, but efforts continue every year to improve the quality of this audio to enhance the experience of viewers, says Davies.

Doing so is a mix of technology and how personnel are allocated. On the technology side, audio compression helps make the conversations on the two-way radios clearer. When it comes to personnel, Fox Sports dedicates one person to a radio submixer whose only job is to “pepper in actual talk,” he says.

“Then we actually have a racing radios editor, who is actually in his home in Georgia. He listens to the radio and actually plays it back, depending on what the content is,” says Davies.

The Fox Sports senior vice president adds that work is underway on a project that sometime this race season aims to add captions to those conversations. “We’re working with Veritone on that project. It’s a difficult challenge. By the nature of radios not being that great of a source when it comes to quality, generating those captions is going to be a feat.”

Distributed Workflow
While there are 30 to 40 Fox Sports production personnel on site, NASCAR production has transitioned over the past few years to a distributed model workflow. The broadcaster will leverage production personnel in the Fox Sports Vault in Los Angeles, others in Pittsburgh and still others at its Charlotte, N.C., NASCAR studio. There is also a video editor as well as the racing radios editor and racing radios mixer who will be working from their homes, says Davies.

“This is the thing about NASCAR, every year for the last four years, I’ve lost an entire truck from our compound,” he says. “What you see today compared to 2018 is four fewer trucks, and we are doing exactly the same show, if not more.”

The main production vehicles on site are Game Creek’s Cleatus A and B units, which will be used by Fox Sports and NBC Sports throughout the NASCAR racing season. While an SDI-based truck, SMPTE ST 2110 is playing a big role on site for distribution although “the core is still good-old SDI,” he says.

What really drew attention to the decline in the number of trucks on site in Davies’ mind was a conversation he had with a younger crew member. “I was talking to one of the kids who hadn’t been here before, and I recounted the days when we had ESPN and DirecTV here—literally 20 trucks in the compound. But it’s not like that anymore.”

“At this point, I’ve kind of hit rock bottom,” Davies adds with a chuckle. “I wasn’t able to lose another truck this year.”

More information on XtraMotion is available on the EVS website.

More information on Bell Helmets is available online.

More information on video production drones is available on the Beverly Hills Aerials website.

More information on Veritone is available online.

BERGEN, Norway—Vizrt today publicly announced Viz AI, a new graphics solution that Fox Sports premiered last weekend during its production of the Daytona 500 NASCAR season opener from Daytona, Fla.

The assistance of vendor partners like Vizrt has made it possible for the broadcaster to find new ways to layer information on the screen, said Zac Fields, senior vice president of graphic tech at Fox Sports SVP Graphic Tech and Integration. 

“The new Viz AI technology allows for sleeker and more elegant solutions for data delivery. We plan on exploring how we can use this technology on other sports broadcasts,” he said.

Fox Sports’ coverage of the Daytona 500 featured a modern design package created for the 2022 NASCAR season. It focuses on eye-catching colors and adds in 3D elements and informational graphics. The design also brings a video-game-like style to the broadcast and highlights the hero moments for the athletes in a more engaging and compelling way.

Vizrt's new Object Tracker, powered by Viz AI, detects and tracks objects—in this case, race cars—over any incoming video feed. Simplicity and non-intrusiveness are among its key strengths. No complex camera tracking or other data inputs are required, Vizrt said

A video signal is all that’s needed to apply the AI technology. Once a user selects an object, Vizrt's 3D graphics can be applied This gives the viewer contextually rich insights without having to look away from the action, the company said.

More information is available on the company’s website.

PITTSBURGH—NEP Group has announced the release of a new mobile unit, SRT3, which was custom-built to support NASCAR’s Shared Resources.

SRT3 connects to both the NEP and NASCAR centralized production environments, NEP said. Its main functions include supporting all of NASCAR’s broadcast obligations, including the distribution of shared resource signals needed by various broadcast partners, the encoding of signals used for the remote production of world feeds, screen feeds, officiating, scoring and race control.

“Implementing NEP’s SRT3 for the 2022 NASCAR season has been a successful collaboration between our production teams and NEP’s talented team of broadcast engineers,” said Steve Stum, vice president, operations and technical production, NASCAR.  “We are excited about what this new mobile unit is adding to NASCAR’s Shared Resources and to our various broadcast partners, both for today and for what it will provide us in the future.”

This new mobile unit serves as the broad solution supporting NASCAR’s main production, and has the ability to easily transition to employ more IP gear so that it can support NASCAR’s current and future needs, NEP said. 

SRT3 is powered by NEP’s Platform Control (TFC), a proprietary software solution that comes pre-loaded in new NEP mobile units like SRT3. 

TFC is the control system used throughout NEP’s ecosystem, including traditional remote facilities as well as centralized production facilities. TFC allows for configuring, provisioning, orchestration and granular monitoring of broadcast, IT and network systems. Built by NEP’s software engineers to solve the industry issues around IP control and software defined networking (SDN), TFC is technology agnostic, making it compatible with virtually any technology in the broadcast and live event environment.

SRT3 debuted at NASCAR’s inaugural “Clash at the Coliseum” race at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on Feb. 6, 2022. The LA Memorial Coliseum was transformed from a grass venue to a quarter-mile asphalt racetrack for this unique exhibition, and NEP’s SRT3 supported NASCAR in capturing the sights and sounds to tell the story of this historic event for the sport.

Following the success of its first show, SRT3 is now supporting NASCAR’s marquee event, this week’s 64th running of the Daytona 500, before deploying to each race on the 2022 circuit.

“The collaboration of NEP’s Systems Integration, Engineering and Remote Operations teams has evolved with much success. This project brings new innovations to the broadcast compound and everyone is proud of what’s been accomplished,” said Glen Levine, president, NEP U.S. Broadcast Services. “This continues NEP’s decades-long relationship with NASCAR. Like so many projects we’ve worked with NASCAR on over the years, this technical solution was born in partnership with their production and technical teams. They were in need of a broadcast solution and trusted NEP to deliver a mobile unit design that meets all of their needs.” 

DAYTONA, Fla.—NASCAR’S Next Gen car will make its official debut Sunday, Feb. 20, here with the motorsport’s Cup Series at the Daytona 500, but there’s more to this seventh generation of the sport’s stock car than its resemblance to the cars fans actually drive, especially when it comes to television production.

Alongside the changes that give the car faster acceleration and make it more nimble—as Kurt Busch noted after making a test run in November—this latest generation car incorporates updates for where in-car cameras are positioned and how telemetry and video and audio data are transmitted.

“NASCAR included us in the design, which I thought was pretty cool,” says Michael Davies, senior vice president, technical and field operations, at Fox Sports. “We went down to the [NASCAR] R&D Center in Concord, N.C., and we had a body for the new car. We played around with where we could put cameras with the actual guys who were testing the car.

“It was the first time we actually had our director and producer… [involved with where] we were able to position the cameras,” he added.

(Fox and Fox Deportes will air the Daytona 500 on Sunday, Feb. 20, starting at 2:30 p.m. ET. It also will be available on the Fox Sports app. The pre-race show begins at 11 a.m. ET on FS1 and moves to Fox at 1 p.m. ET.)

Two notable changes were made to camera positioning. First, the front bumper cam was positioned extremely low to the ground. “It doesn't sound like a front bumper cam is something that would actually make a difference. But you know, when you see it, it's pretty cool,” says Davies.

The second, which may or may not be ready for Sunday’s race, is a rear spoiler cam looking down the side of the car that required “a fair amount of collaboration with NASCAR,” he says. 

Video Game Previs
As with its coverage of the Busch Light Clash at the Los Angeles Coliseum two weeks ago, Fox Sports turned to video games for previsualization of the types of shots that were possible—but this time instead of being used to determine camera positions at the venue, they helped in deciding where the front bumper and rear spoiler cams should be located.

“Obviously, in video games there's some cameras that you can duplicate and some that you can't,” says Davies. “But, you know, the spoiler shot and the front bumper shot were directly informed by the way people play video games.”

NASCAR, however, didn’t fulfill all of the broadcaster’s wishes for new in-car camera positioning. Most notably, Fox had suggested a new camera location inside the car, but by time the car’s design was completed, “a bunch of stuff” newly added to the interior obstructed its view, he says.

But the visor cam that clips to drivers’ helmets will offer viewers a good look at something new—the Next Gen car’s redesigned dashboard and the new video rearview mirror, he says.

While the in-car cameras continue to be 720p HD, that’s not for a lack of trying to upgrade to 1080p HD. However, the supply chain issues that have rippled across the economy prevented them from being ready for Daytona. Over the season, as availability allows, the 1080p cameras will replace the older existing cameras, says Davies.

While Fox broadcasts in 720p, Fox Sports will produce the Daytona 500 in 1080p, which will be downconverted. “The only people who will see it in 1080p are the people in the production truck,” says Davies.

Supply chain disruptions also delayed Next Gen car updates to telemetry. “The car is kind of set up for the future in terms of being able to move signals around it more efficiently, trying to get the camera feeds and the data and the telemetry in one feed,” he says. 

As with the 1080p in-car camera upgrade, Fox had to postpone the change until later in the season when the technology required becomes more readily available, says Davies.

‘Bites Of The Apple’
Beyond the cars themselves, Fox Sports will enhance its use of drones and add an 80-foot camera crane.

“Daytona has a really exciting, front midway. We wanted to bring people out there, especially for a fairly long pre-race [show], which is what we have. We're going to use the crane for that shot,” says Davies.

By the time the race begins, the crane will be repositioned to the backstretch. There it will be used to “try to peek over that back car,” he says.

Fox also will add a new graphics look customized for the race. “The interesting thing about the way Fox is approaching the graphics package now is that instead of having one graphics package that kind of gets morphed into other sports, each graphics package is completely different for every sport,” says Davies.

One other tech change is the production truck that will be used in Daytona. Fox Sports will rely on Game Creek Encore to do the show instead of Game Creek Cleatus, the truck it normally uses for race coverage. That truck was on the West Coast to produce "The Clash" at the L.A. Coliseum a few weeks back and will be used as the race season progresses. “Encore is the same truck that does football and will do the Super Bowl next year,” he says.

Davies, who has been doing Daytona 500 for 16 years, notes this year’s race schedule is different than in the past—a change he sees with an upside. 

“It used to be that The Clash was the week before [the Daytona 500]. We had sort of a regimented schedule that really hadn't changed for years,” he says.

“This time we have the ARCA [Menards Series], the Duels and then Daytona. So now, there's literally five races between… [the start of the season] and Sunday, which is good because it gives us a lot of bites at the apple in terms of getting it right,” says Davies. 

LOS ANGELES—Here’s something you don’t see every day: NASCAR drivers locked in competitive races on a newly built 0.25-mile-long oval asphalt track on the floor of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

But that’s exactly what NASCAR has planned for The Busch Light Clash At The Coliseum on Sunday, Feb. 6, and Fox Sports will be there to chronicle the spectacle—a first for NASCAR and television production, too. (NASCAR RaceDay on Fox starts at 2 p.m. EST with coverage through qualifying rounds, musical performances and the Clash, which begins at 6 p.m. EST.)

“Coverage is all about doing this event justice,” says Michael Davies, senior vice president of technical and field operations at Fox Sport. “We’re the lucky stewards of this crazy experiment, and you know, this is right in our wheelhouse. We like to experiment on TV, and apparently NASCAR likes to experiment with their sport.”

The Race
That experiment centers on a track just under half the length of the Martinsville Speedway in Ridgeway, Va., NASCAR’s shortest track prior to Sunday’s race, and the 23 drivers who will compete in the Clash following a series of qualifiers. The Clash, a preseason exhibition race, is a 37.5-mile-long race or a total of 150 laps. (The official NASCAR season starts with the Daytona 500 on Feb. 20—also on Fox).

Besides the track, ample track walls, track catching fencing and safer barriers have been installed in the Coliseum in preparation for racing. 

Qualifiers begin on Feb. 5 when 40 racers compete against the clock to determine their starting positions in four 25-lap Heat Races of 10 drivers each the next day during the telecast. The top four drivers from each heat automatically qualify for The Clash, but before the main event the 24 remaining drivers will compete again in two 50-lap Last Chance Races, each with 12 drivers. The top three from each of these races will advance as well. The 23rd and final spot will be filled by the driver with the highest point finish last season who did not qualify for The Clash.

Besides being the first NASCAR race in the Los Angeles Coliseum, The Clash will also be the first race for NASCAR’s Next Gen car—originally scheduled to debut last season but postponed due to the pandemic. Its official debut will be at the Daytona 500.

The Production
Fox Sports has regularly produced sports coverage like University of Southern California (USC) and NFL football from the Coliseum over the years, but those productions haven’t offered a lot of guidance for planning coverage of this weekend’s race. Rather, the production team has simulated what it expects coverage to look like with the help of online video game iRacing, says Davies.

“But in terms of what’s actually going to happen and how Artie Kempner, our director, is going to cover it, it’s going to be a learning experience,” he says.

Unlike other NASCAR race coverage, production of The Clash offers a couple of unique opportunities for how cameras are used. One of the most obvious will be views of the entire track and all of the cars in the same shot. “You’ll be able to see end zone to end zone,” says Davies.

The other will the use of SkyCam to cover the race, which is pretty much table stakes for NFL games, but given the unique setting of The Clash may be a first for NASCAR. Suspended on a cable system, SkyCam has the freedom to move over the entire track, capturing never-before-seen angles of NASCAR racing, says Davies.. 

“I think the SkyCam will probably end up being one of the most used coverage cameras even though we have all the other cameras,” he says.

Fox Sports will deploy a large complement of cameras, ranging from a half dozen robotic cameras and a jib-mounted camera in the peristyle area of the Coliseum to in-car RF cameras and POVs tucked inside the walls in the safer barriers.

But because of the size of the track, the locations of many of these and the other cameras to be used needed a rethink. “From a camera position standpoint, you have to reinvent coverage for a smaller track. Overall, you're just basically shrinking what you do,” says Davies.

Initially, Fox Sports planned to use camera positions in place for football coverage, but as the track was built on the Coliseum floor it became apparent these cameras needed to be higher. “Once we went up there, it kind of started to look like a NASCAR event,” he says. 

Drone-mounted cameras will provide aerial shots outside of the Coliseum of the haulers, drivers and garage, and Super Slow-Motion cameras and EVS XtraMotion will be deployed for coverage of the race, he says.

Audio production is a concern given the decibel level of a NASCAR race and the relatively tiny bowl-like venue. While camera operators and other members of the production team will wear noise-cancelling headsets to hear direction over the roar, Fox Sports abandoned the Coliseum’s open broadcast booth for its announcer team of Mike Joy, Tony Stewart and Clint Bowyer. “We actually moved the announcers over to an ancillary booth where we knew that the windows wound never be open,” says Davies.

Graphics and EVS servers will be controlled remotely from Pittsburgh because that’s where many of Fox Sports’ “core operators” reside, adds Davies.

Preparing to cover The Clash brings back memories of another recent production for Davies. “It reminds me of when we did Field of Dreams [the MLB game between the Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees in Dyersville, Iowa] last year. When you do anything for the first time, especially take a sport and just transplant it into someplace it's never been, you know, allows for a certain degree of uncertainty. That’s exciting.”

NEW YORK—NBCSN, the cable sports network owned by NBCUniversal, will be shut down by the end of 2021, with its live sport programming, which includes NHL games and NASCAR races, transitioning to USA Network and Peacock.

The Hollywood Reporter obtained an internal memo from NBC Sports Chairman Pete Bevacqua that details the decision.

NHL games, which will include Stanley Cup playoff games, and NASCAR races will start to air on USA Network later this year. Other key elements of NBCSN’s programming will move to USA Network, though in some cases programming will head to Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming service.

In addition to the NHL and NASCAR, NBCSN hosted Premier League soccer matches, live Olympics coverage, as well as smaller sports like professional lacrosse. Olympics coverage will likely move to NBC Sports’ The Olympic Channel, though it is not clear if other sports programming will play on USA Network or be exclusive to Peacock.

“This will make USA Network an extraordinarily powerful platform in the media marketplace, and gives our sports programming a significant audience boost,” said Bevacqua in the staff memo. “We believe that the power of this offering is the best long-term strategy for our Sports Group, our partners and our company.

“This transition, combined with our robust portfolio of assets, including Golf Channel, The Olympic Channel: Home of Team USA, RSNs, SportsEngine, GolfNow, digital, audio, sports betting and gaming, puts us in an even stronger position as leaders in the sports media space and to continue to grow our business.”

TV Tech’s sister publication B+C called the decision “further evidence that media companies are shifting from their profitable cable networks to the hot streaming category.”

STAMFORD, Conn.—The NASCAR 2020 Cup Series crossed the finish line on Nov. 8, and despite a season interrupted by COVID-19 and reported record streaming numbers, NBC Sports says that its TV audience matched what it was in 2019.

Throughout 19 races on NBC and NBCSN, NASCAR 2020 Cup Series viewership produced a Total Audience Delivery of 2.597 million viewers, per Nielsen and digital data from Adobe Analytics; the same TAD there was for 2019’s 19 races produced by NBC Sports.

Races that were broadcast on NBC (eight for the 2020 season) actually saw a 3% increase over 2019, averaging a TAD of 3.234 million viewers; 2019’s average was 3.147 million. The season-capping race on NBC produced 3.093 million viewers—peaking at 4.087 million at the finish— up 18% from the 2.588 million that watched the final 2019 playoff race on NBC. 

This level TV viewership came even as NBC Sports recorded its most-streamed NASCAR season to date, with an Average Minute Audience of 27,300 viewers, up 29% from 2019 (21,100 viewers).

The top market for NASCAR on NBC and NBCSN was Greenville-Spartanburg, S.C., with a 4.2 local rating. The top 10 also featured Charlotte, N.C. (4.0); Knoxville, Tenn. (4.0); Greensboro-High Point, N.C. (3.8); Indianapolis (3.5); Richmond, Va. (3.3); Ft. Myers-Naples (3.1); Nashville (3.0); Birmingham, Ala. (3.0); and Dayton, Ohio (2.9).

BALTIMORE—The abbreviated regular season for Major League Baseball (MLB) is already more than half over, but the big story in this COVID-19 scarred season doesn’t seem to concern what’s happening on the field.

Some viewers might say it’s about heightening the fan experience. The season has featured, at various points, cardboard cutouts of fans in the pretty people seats, groups of virtual fans that fill a 40,000-seat ballpark and sounds of the game that are piped in and accentuated during tape-measure homers or a game-ending strikeouts—often against a background of virtual ads that are appearing in areas of the venue where they are not normally seen.

That’s about making today’s game more appealing to players who aren’t used to playing in empty steel and concrete caverns and fans who are used to heightened broadcast production.

For MLB, Fox Sports is using augmented reality, “with graphic recreations of fans from video game engines and tracking them with four cameras to make the event look real,” said Michael Davies, senior vice president, field and tech operations for the sports net. “At the moment, it has its limitations. For instance, when a player appears between the camera and the fans, it breaks the illusion.”

Still, the Fox Sports approach is a far cry from the first sporting events that aired post-COVID-19 this spring, such as ESPN’s Korean Baseball Organization [KBO] broadcasts that featured not only the cutouts, but stuffed animals.

THE COMEBACK

Davies said Fox Sports has been using “balanced crowd sounds, which don’t react too much to the action. We’re doing a separate crowd mix for TV, which is a bit more reactionary and dynamic. Overall, we have found that viewers notice when crowd noise isn’t there, but you don’t notice when it is; so we’re looking to make the viewing experience seem somewhat normal.”

Fox Sports got in the game, so to speak, with auto racing, with real drivers in virtual cars, then real NASCAR races in May. “We didn’t need crowd audio for NASCAR because it’s normally not a big factor in the mix,” he said. “Then NASCAR gradually began adding fans, which got us back to work during the COVID-19 era—and we got through the broadcasts with no infections.”

That’s due, in part, to fewer people on site working on the productions. “We moved some of our replay and graphics people to our base in Los Angeles, and the announcers and producers to Charlotte,” Davies said. “The distributed production, with the crew’s cooperation, allowed us to keep our on-site employees safer.”

He said Fox Sports has cast a keen eye on the different strategies other broadcasters and leagues are using, noting, “Everyone has a slightly different take: the MLS had virtual Zoom windows, the NBA has live fan feeds on LED boards and then there were [KBO] baseball games with stuffed animals—some have been using different levels of crowd audio, some have not.”

Oddly enough, someone who had been thinking about supplemental sound for more than 10 years guided Fox Sports’ new approach to the sounds of the game.

“When COVID-19 started, I got a phone call from Fred Vogler, an audio engineer who runs an L.A.-based sonofans. He had worked with Pete Carroll when he was head coach at USC,” he said. “Fred would go to different PAC 12 stadiums and record crowd noise so the team could get a flavor of what playing their opponents on the road was like.”

Fox ended up hiring Vogler and his team “to work with us on MLS, MLB and even boxing, which has never been done with audio,” Davies said. “It’s old school, because there is nothing tied into a data feed. It’s simply someone watching the game and orchestrating the crowd reaction based on what it would normally do. It’s almost like they’re musically ‘scoring’ the game with the crowd.”

SOUND FROM ALL AROUND 

For Vogler, the union with Fox Sports is a great example of the power of persistence. “We suddenly have sporting events with no one in the stands, so we’re using live recordings of baseball crowds,” he said.

“We have layers of sounds, as well,” Vogler said. “For broadcasts, our crew of four uses a left-right front and left-right rear mics to get a quadrophonic atmosphere that gives us almost the usual amount of crowd noise. The idea is to have an operator who loves baseball and knows what reactions come at certain points, and give them access so they can react at the right time with the right sounds.

sonofans’ “focus is to create a dynamic bed of sounds that can increase in level with the varying intensities of the game,” he said, via the MADI protocol and trigger pads, plus hybrid software packages (some propriety) “that allow us to access hundreds of files ranging from cheers to clapping to boos—and up to about 30 variations of each.

“You can also hit all three at once, which is often just as a crowd would respond at a game,” Vogler said.

It’s also important to know that a typical non-COVID-19 fan base sounds completely different in each sport. “We’ve also done some MLS matches and they were a hoot,” he said. “Soccer fans have their own chants and cheer to drum beats that provide the crucial pulse of a match; and boxing crowds are aggressive; you can hear their intensity. They have a staccato approach, with tight, percussive voices.”

At Silver Spoon Animation in Brooklyn, N.Y., Executive Producer Laura Herzing and her crew are providing virtual crowds and on-screen graphics via a custom platform called “Crowded” which incorporates Unreal Engine and Pixototte, which enables real-time compositing via a live camera feed and tracking data that is live-composited into the crowd shots.

Herzing said Silver Spoon started working with Fox Sports on three MLB games on July 25 and has worked on a few games a week since; like Vogler, she also noted that such an approach wasn’t needed until this season.

“What we’re doing is similar to using elements of video games in broadcasts,” she said. “Unreal is widely used in the gaming industry, so what we basically did was take that technology and use it another way, for real-time rendering and in the broadcast. We don’t want to trick the viewers, but we want to lend the usual atmosphere they find at the ballpark.”

She and Vogler both appreciate the progressive approach they find working with Fox Sports, which “exhibits an edge when it comes to experimentation,” she said. Vogler agreed, adding, “Most sports broadcasters are just using field mics [to air] the sounds from the empty ballpark. Not Fox Sports.”

Davies shared praise as well, saying companies like sonofans and Silver Spoon “are creating a cottage industry and have emerged as leaders.”

LIVE AND VIRTUAL COUNTERPARTS

Videogaming professionals are not surprised at this sudden melding of two seemingly different worlds.

“This really provides an in-depth look at how closely both live sports and their virtual counterparts are,” said Trevor Williams, CEO of esports events company Capitol Underground in Washington, D.C., “Games like 2K, Madden, FIFA and MLB are constantly trying to create immersive worlds that replicate their live-action counterparts, so when the major [sports] leagues take a play out of the gaming playbook, it doesn’t strike me as shocking.”

Those words were echoed by William Collis, co-founder of Boston-based Oxygen Esports and author of “The Book of Esports.” “I don’t think what’s happening now is any different than what’s happened over time with instant replay, enhanced graphics and other augmentations of sports broadcasts, like the down lines appearing on screen in football,” he said, “so why shouldn’t this trend continue with borrowing from video games?”

Collis offered an example from recent Summer Olympics broadcasts. They “were already enhancing and remixing the sound for rowing,” he said, “for which it’s virtually impossible to acquire broadcast-quality audio.”

Also noting the burgeoning popularity of Statcast, he said, “What separates a video game from the TV broadcast is the interactivity, so it makes sense to incorporate elements from video games to make broadcasts more interesting.”

“What this is about,” said Collis, “is two similar industries evolving their broadcasts. And sometimes with a powerful video game engine and the best software, it’s hard to tell if a video game broadcast on TV is actually a real game or not.”

Such innovation often involves risk, but typically not those of the health variety. Davies reiterated that Fox Sports is bringing its viewers back toward as normal an experience as safely as possible.

That includes the basic masks, sanitizers “and spacing the crew in the truck,” he said, with UV light technology on hand to sanitize the truck’s surfaces “and anything else lying around.”

Of course, the protocols make everyone’s job more difficult. “It takes 100% more time to get the show on the air. You can’t crowd elevators, for instance, and the buffets are over for now; everyone gets a box lunch,” he said.

However, the changes haven’t been all disruptive. Davies thinks much of what Fox Sports is doing will continue post-COVID-19, but in a more expedient fashion.

“Technology has sped up,” he said.

Live sports are back, just not as you remember them prior to the outbreak of COVID-19. This past weekend saw some of the first live, broadcast TV action of multiple sports, highlighted by the return of NASCAR, a PGA golf match for charity and the German Bundesliga professional soccer league.

NASCAR and Fox Sports worked together to bring the first of seven races over the next 11 days to TV viewers on May 17 at the Darlington Raceway in South Carolina. Kevin Harvick was the winner, and he acknowledged the different circumstances of the race, saying that he missed the fans in the stands.

NASCAR’s live race schedule continues on May 20 from Darlington, with other races scheduled up to May 27 at this point. Additional races are expected to be announced.

NBC Sports, meanwhile, was tasked with bringing live golf back to its airwaves on May 17 as well, just in a different format. Rather than a full-fledged tournament, top professionals Rory McIlroy, Dustin Johnson, Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolfe played a “teamed skins” competition at Seminole Golf Club in Juno Beach, Fla. The players carried their own bags, had an audio pack attached to capture their dialogue and practiced social distancing. 

The broadcast crew also adjusted to the new realities. Commentator Mike Tirico called the action remotely from his home in Michigan, while other commentators Rich Lerner, Paul Azinger and Gary Koch worked from the PGA Tour’s production facility in St. Augustine, Fla. On the course, a skeleton crew manned six cameras and utilized LiveU technology to capture the action. The broadcast also featured some call-in interviews, including Bill Murray and President Donald Trump.

PLUS: How Remote Production Can Help Get Live Sports Back on the Air Amid COVID-19

The skins match raised money for charity, with the winning team of McIlroy and Johnson earning $1.85 million for the American Nurses Foundation, and Fowler and Wolfe earning $1.15 million for the CDC. In addition, more than $5 million was donated by event partners and individual fans for COVID-19 relief efforts.

Another live golf match will take place on May 24—with Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Peyton Manning and Tom Brady—before the PGA Tour is slated to return to its usual schedule (sans fans) in June.

Across the pond in Europe, Bundesliga, Germany’s professional soccer league, returned with live matches, again with safety guidelines for both players and broadcast crews, which included a limit of 300 people allowed in the stands among teams and staff, but no fans—though the league tried to address that by putting up cutouts of fans in the stands. 

Six games were held over the weekend, with Fox Sports’ broadcast of the Borussia Dortmund vs. Schalke match earning a record .33 rating. Bundesliga is expected to continue playing, and broadcasting, the remaining nine weeks of its season.

DARLINGTON, S.C.—NASCAR will be one of the first professional leagues to return with live competition following the outbreak of coronavirus in March. With a series of seven races over 11 days between two locations, Fox Sports has been tasked with bringing back the thrill of race day to fans while keeping both its production crew and NASCAR team members safe from the potential spread of COVID-19.

The NASCAR season will get rolling again with the Darlington 400 at the Darlington Raceway in South Carolina on May 17, airing of Fox (additional races will be aired on FS1). Michael Davies, senior vice president of technical operations for Fox Sports, spoke with TV Technology about how the broadcast crew will meet the demands of the production while staying safe

SOLID BANDWIDTH

It all begins with something that was put in place even before COVID-19. The connectivity installed at racetracks—which was added just a few years ago with help from AT&T, according to Davies—enables crew at the track to communicate with others off-site.

“We have an immense amount of bandwidth that we’re able to share with NASCAR to be able to connect those sites,” said Davies. “We are able to leverage that technology to look and work a little bit differently.”

For example, remote operations.

A number of crew members will be working remotely for these races, including the announcers. Those working remotely were able to get some practice over the past two months with “iRacing,” virtual races that NASCAR organized and broadcast, something that made the production crew more comfortable with the new reality, said Davies.

There will still be a good number of crew members at the track on race day, albeit slimmed down. Davies described mobile production units as the “antithesis of social distancing,” and as a result will have a limited number of crew operating from within on race day. There will also be fewer crew members covering the pit areas, as NASCAR has adapted how race teams handle pit stops.

A WIDER VIEW

Still, Davies expects the look of the race to be similar for those watching on TV, as most of the main camera positions will be in place, as well as in-car cameras. There may even be an advantage to the fact that these races will be held without any fans in the stands.

“I’m looking forward to see how we can use the entire racetrack, whereas before we had to work around, obviously, a very large audience,” Davies said. “That could be one of the interesting side effects of things not only in NASCAR but other sports as well, where you might actually have places where you couldn’t put cameras and now you can.”

Of course, there are extra safety precautions that need to be taken to try and prevent the spread of the virus. In pre-COVID days, a lot of equipment would be shared among crew members, something that is not advisable in this current environment. The solution was easy when it came to headsets—everyone got their own—but for cameras and other equipment, Davies said they will be relying on UVC robots that can sterilize the equipment between uses. Mobile units will also have a specific cleaning regimen.

SMALLER FOOTPRINT

Fox Sports is also attempting to minimize its footprint, as well as its ease of operation, by using the same crew and equipment for all of the scheduled races, driving the mobile units from Darlington to Charlotte, N.C.

“The problem with NASCAR is it’s a pretty purpose-built kind of deal, so if you were to use different facilities and what not, what you would gain in potentially in a little less driving you would lose again in how much and how many people it would take to set up,” Davies explained.

At this time, NASCAR has not announced any additional races beyond May 27, but Davies does share that there are plans to continue the season after that date. As the season progresses, Davies expects that Fox Sports’ broadcast procedures will evolve as well.

“Safe be said, we’re looking to learn from this first one, and we know the production is going to evolve,” Davies said. “I’ve just encouraged everybody to be agile and that unlike a lot of other things where you can just say, ‘alright, this is what we’re going to do for the entire season,’ we just need to be ever vigilant on change. 

“And with a dynamic situation like this, it’s important to have your eyes open in terms of better ways of doing things as technology grows, as the response and ability to do different things grows,” Davies added. “While I’m really happy where we are starting out, I have no doubt that things will evolve as we move forward.”

The Darlington 400 will air on Sunday, May 17, at 3 p.m. ET on Fox.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.—NASCAR has announced that live races will return starting on May 17 after postponing the season back in March due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Seven races will take place over an 11-day period, however all taking place at two locations—Darlington Raceway in South Carolina and Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina—and without fans in attendance. The schedule includes the Coca-Cola 600 on May 24.

All of the races will be broadcast live on either Fox or Fox Sports 1.

Here is the announced schedule:

• May 17, Cup Series, Darlington Raceway, 3:30 p.m ET on Fox 
• May 19, Xfinity Series, Darlington Raceway, 8 p.m. ET on FS1 
• May 20, Cup Series, Darlington Raceway, 7:30 p.m. ET on FS1 
• May 24, Cup Series, Charlotte Motor Speedway, 6 p.m. ET on Fox 
• May 25, Xfinity Series, Charlotte Motor Speedway, 7:30 p.m. ET on FS1 
• May 26, Gander Trucks Series, Charlotte Motor Speedway, 8 p.m. ET on FS1 
• May 27, Cup Series, Charlotte Motor Speedway, 8 p.m. ET on FS1 

“We are excited to welcome back the Fox NASCAR season to our airwaves to provide a return to live sports, a move toward normalcy and a much-needed distraction during these unprecedented times,” said Mark Silverman, president, National Networks, Fox Sports. “While we are thrilled to return to the race track, the health and safety of our employees and all race participants is our top priority. We will continue working in lockstep with our partners at NASCAR and the race tracks to follow all national and local health guidelines.”

PLUS: Tennis Channel to Broadcast Live Matches May 1-4

NASCAR expects to make additional schedule announcements in the future.

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—NASCAR has chosen Calrec Audio’s Summa digital broadcast audio console for its studio upgrade.

Audio operators can control Summa via a 17-inch multi-touchscreen with a straightforward interface that uses established finger gestures to navigate the system. Bluefin2 technology gives Summa a pool of 180- or 128-channel processing paths, eight groups, four mains, 16 auxes and 32 tracks and its Hydra2 core provides Summa with the same integral router technology as the Apollo and Artemis consoles, the company said.

“Calrec’s reputation for sports coverage throughout the industry speaks volumes and made us the leading contender in their upgrade process,” says Rob Lewis, national technical sales, Calrec Audio. “As the most relied on brand in U.S. sports, many existing A1s are already very familiar with mixing on Calrec consoles.”

SEATTLE—June 4, 2019—Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) has chosen AWS as its standard for cloud-based machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads. NASCAR will use the breadth and depth of AWS technologies to build cloud-based services and automate processes, including a new video series on NASCAR.com called This Moment in NASCAR History powered by AWS. The video series will debut heading into the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series™ race at Michigan International Speedway, sharing the greatest historical moments in NASCAR racing with viewers. NASCAR is migrating its 18-petabyte video archive to AWS, and will leverage Amazon Rekognition—an AWS service that adds intelligent image and video analysis to applications—to automatically tag specific video frames with metadata, such as driver, car, race, lap, time, and sponsors so they can easily search those tags to surface the most iconic moments from past races. By using AWS’s services, NASCAR expects to save thousands of hours of manual search time each year, and will be able to easily surface flashbacks like Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s 1987 “Pass in the Grass” or Denny Hamlin’s 2016 Daytona 500 photo finish, and quickly deliver these to fans via video clips on NASCAR.com and social media channels.

NASCAR will leverage AWS services to enhance its full range of media assets including websites, mobile applications, and social properties for its 80 million fans worldwide. NASCAR plans to use Amazon SageMaker to train deep learning models against 70 years of historical footage to enhance metadata and video analytics. With Amazon Transcribe, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service, NASCAR will be able to caption and time stamp every word of speech within archived videos so that NASCAR video producers can easily locate source footage via text searches. In addition, NASCAR will use AWS Media Services, including AWS Elemental MediaLive and AWS Elemental MediaStore, to support NASCAR Drive, which puts fans in the driver’s seat using in-car cameras, live audio, and live leaderboards. These AWS Media Services enable NASCAR to process, package, and store broadcast video content, including live races, for delivery to broadcast and industry partners.

“Speed and efficiency are key in racing and business which is why we chose AWS—the cloud with unmatched performance, the most comprehensive set of services, and the fastest pace of innovation—to accelerate our migration to the cloud,” said Craig Neeb, Executive Vice President of Innovation and Development, NASCAR. “Leveraging AWS to power our new video series gives our highly engaged fans a historical look at our sport while providing a sneak peek at the initial results of this exciting collaboration.”

“Amazon’s 20 years of machine learning experience, along with our broad analytics and machine learning capabilities, make us the best choice for organizations who want to use machine learning to gain insights into their data and establish new levels of engagement with their customers,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “NASCAR is utilizing cloud technology to enhance the way people experience the sport and delivering even more impactful content to fans. AWS’s unmatched portfolio of cloud services gives NASCAR the most flexible and powerful tools to bring new elements of the sport to live broadcasts of races.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 13 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 165 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 66 Availability Zones (AZs) within 21 geographic regions, spanning the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Sweden, and the UK. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About NASCAR

The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, Inc. (NASCAR) is the sanctioning body for the No. 1 form of motorsports in the United States. NASCAR consists of three national series (Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series™, NASCAR Xfinity Series™, and NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck Series™), three regional series, one local grassroots series, three international series and the Automobile Racing Club of America (ARCA). The International Motor Sports Association™ (IMSA®) governs the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship™, the premier U.S. sports car series. Based in Daytona Beach, Fla., with offices in eight cities across North America, NASCAR sanctions more than 1,200 races in more than 30 U.S. states, Canada, Mexico and Europe. For more information visit www.NASCAR.com and www.IMSA.com, and follow NASCAR on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat (‘NASCAR’).

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Fox Sports together with Chapman Aerial Production unveiled its most advanced drone-camera to date for race coverage April 28 from Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway.

The FreeFly Alta 8 drone using the newly developed FreeFly MoVi Carbon camera gimbal with five-axis stabilization is outfitted with a Fujinon 20-120mm lens, said Fox Sports. With the crop factor of the sensor, the focal range of the lens is elevated to 40-240mm.

The Fox Sports technical and production teams began executing on their vision of using drone cameras to enhance race coverage with early experiments three years ago that gave way to tethered drone use for the 2018 Daytona 500 and the broadcaster’s first untethered drone deployment at this year’s Daytona 500, said Brad Cheney, Fox Sports VP of field operations.

The drone at Talladega this weekend will “add dynamic views, not seen before in motor sports,” added Fox Sports director Artie Kempner.

Pre-race programming began with NASCAR Raceday at 12:30 p.m. EDT on FS1 and the FOX Sports App. At 1:30 p.m., coverage moved to the FOX broadcast network, followed by the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Geico 500 at 2 p.m.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.—The sheer number of possibilities today’s technology puts on the table for television production—especially high-profile ones where there is no dearth of money or people—makes it imperative that the way technology is applied enhances storytelling rather than getting in the way, says Michael Davies, senior vice president of field operations at Fox Sports.

“We are in a technological era where we are sort of in a dream—if you can dream it, you can do it,” says Davies, who this weekend will do his 13th Daytona 500 production. “That creates a lot of opportunities, but it can be a bit of slippery slope.”

This year’s Daytona 500 (Sunday, Feb. 17, starting at 2 p.m. EST on Fox and also livestreamed on the Fox Sports Go app) is a case in point. While Fox Sports will deploy all of the technology normally associated with the production of such a high-profile race, it also aims to enhance coverage with several tech goodies making their Daytona debut, including the high-speed Fox Sports Rail Cam, a body jib, enhanced data analytics and a new 3D virtual studio.

Pre-race, the challenge for Davies and Fox Sports producers and directors is separating the wheat from the chaff when considering technology.

“There certainly are many technologies out there that might seem cool on the surface, but in terms of an actual tool for what the producers and directors actually use and then finally what winds up on the screen, it’s a little bit more of a vetting process,” he says.

“A pretty good way to start [in determining what tech will enhance storytelling] is something called ‘the bar test,’” Davies explains. “The bar test is simply can a viewer understand what we are doing from a technology standpoint while sitting in a bar. And the other thing we determine is whether a technology will show the audience things they just otherwise can’t see.”

The rail cam, which Fox Sports first used at the Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, Calif., and Charlotte Motor Speedway in Charlotte, N.C., is a good example of the tests.

“It’s often quite difficult to convey on television how fast the cars are going,” says Davies. But the rail cam, the work of robotic dolly specialist Mega Trax, provides a dynamic shot that does the trick.

Positioned behind the inside wall of Turn 2, the camera can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in about three seconds and reach speeds exceeding 90 mph along its 1,000-foot rail.

“Say the camera is going 80 mph and the cars coming out of that turn are going about 180 mph, the shot lets viewers see the foreground and background moving,” he explains.

Another approach is to go against traffic at 80 mph with the cars coming at the camera at 180 mph. “That’s a dynamic shot that looks great,” says Davies.

In terms of passing the tests, not only does the Fox Sports Rail Cam convey speed to the viewers, it also offers a solution for covering the backstretch. “One of the things we always struggle with is covering the backstretch in the most meaningful way,” says Davies.

“We’ll always get everything, but having a camera like this in a place where you don’t generally get a lot of good close-up shots is pretty cool, especially on the inside wall.”

The body jib, commercially branded the DigiBoom from Redrock Micro, is another new production element that passed the tests. At the Daytona 500, Fox Sports will position an operator wearing the body jib inside the pits to capture stabilized cameras shots.

“It’s like a Steadicam,” says Davies. “In fact, I have a Steadicam operator using it. But with this, you can get high—about 6 feet over [what’s being shot]. You can also go right down on the ground, which you can’t do with a Steadicam.”

The body jib and stabilized camera will be used to get a variety of shots providing a new perspective on the race, including shots of the pit boxes at eye-level with the crew chiefs looking on and shots over the wall showing cars coming at viewers as they go to their pit stalls, he says.

Yet another new production addition for this year’s race is a new touchscreen analysts in the booth will use to break down data in ways that have never before been seen in NASCAR, according to Fox Sports.

“The one great thing about NASCAR is you get more real-time data and real-time telemetry than any other sport,” says Davies.

At Daytona, Fox Sports will use loop data NASCAR captures at multiple point on the track to enable analysts to identify important race changes, such as when each driver is making up or losing positions. The touchscreen format will make it possible for Fox analysts to tell accurate stories about the race in near-real time.

The new 60-by-60-foot virtual studio Fox launched for the start of the 2019 NASCAR Cup series also will contribute mightily to the storytelling. The Charlotte, N.C.-based space enables 3D analysis of racetracks, cars and race shops, and will interact with live coverage of the Daytona 500. (Editor’s note: See “New NASCAR Studio Puts Fox Sports in VR, AR Driver Seat.”)

Of course, these new technologies are layered on a well-established complement of tested production technology, which includes seven main mobile production units, two satellite uplinks, 2MW of power independent of local sources, 12 production trucks, 20 manned cameras, three in-track Gopher Cameras, Super Slow Motion HD and 4K cameras, a 1,100-fps X-Mo camera at the start/finish line, 10 high-speed robotic cameras and 12 on-board in-car camera packages.

While Davies is a champion of the technology that will be used to produce the event, he is quick to acknowledge that it’s the people behind the production who ultimately are responsible for telling the best stories of the race.

“We were very lucky to have won a Sports Emmy for Technical Team Remote [in 2018],” says Davies. “What is different about this NASCAR crew is these men and women eat, breathe and sleep the sport. If you go there and start talking to people, it is like a living, breathing history of NASCAR among the people who work on the show.”

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Fox Sports will debut a new high-tech set as the home of its NASCAR coverage in February 2019 that leverages the latest advancements in virtual set and augmented reality technology to create an element of on-screen sizzle fans won’t soon forget while bringing a high degree of flexibility to its productions.

At the heart of the tech setup behind this sizzle and flexibility is the Epic Games Unreal Engine 4, along with Zero Density studio software, which provides advanced keying for the virtual set, and custom software to enable all of the data needed for the set to be edited in a live broadcast environment.

CUSTOMIZE QUICKLY

A key advantage of basing the new 3,600-square-foot studio on virtual set and augmented reality (AR) technology is the ability to customize studio spaces quickly and affordably for different shows. However, in the view of Zac Fields, senior vice president of Graphic Technology and Integration for Fox Sports, that was not a realistic alternative until recently.

“A lot of networks would institute some green screen space to have some more flexibility of a virtual set,” says Fields. “The problem was they didn’t look nearly as good as what you can do now with the current tools that are out there.”

Having overcome that obstacle, the technology allows Fox Sports to react quickly in a virtual setting to what happens on the racetrack from week to week and show to show without the time or expense of doing something similar with hard set elements or entirely foregoing illustrating an important fact or concept to viewers because of the sheer impossibility of doing so in the real world.

For instance, bringing the Daytona 500 track up from the floor of the virtual set to explain the banking and surface of the track is something that could only be done in a virtual environment, says Mike Dolan, vice president of Design at Fox Sports.

Depending on what’s needed to analyze a race, the system can instantly bring into the set 3D racecars, engines, wheel assemblies and any other element needed to better inform NASCAR fans, he adds.

The core 3D rendering technology along with other essential gear needed for the set gives the designers at Fox Sports an unprecedented level of creative freedom, he adds.

“With these tools, it’s not so much what’s possible,” says Dolan. “It’s what do you want to do? Whatever you can imagine is now possible, and it will look as real as you want.”

Viewers will see the set early next year when it debuts as the home of “NASCAR Race Hub,” “NASCAR RaceDay,” and other NASCAR programming, according to Fox Sports.

WORLD CUP EXPERIENCE

Beyond the core gaming engine and software that powers real-time rendering and a photorealistic look, the studio relies on five Stype Red Spy encoded cameras, including a Steadicam and a jib camera; Blacktrax 3D tracking technology to trigger events on set automatically; a 50-by-47-foot green screen area; and real-time AR combining real set elements and 3D graphics.

Check out this sizzle reel:

While Fox Sports had been tracking the progress of virtual sets and AR technology for a few years, it was the preparations for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia that confirmed to the broadcaster that the technology was fully baked. Fox Sports built a mock-up set simply to show internally what was being planned for coverage of the international soccer championship, including where in Red Square the network wished to locate its set, explains Dolan.

“After we built it, it opened eyes about what is really possible with this platform,” he says.

Video game renderers like the Unreal Engine 4 have increased the level of photorealism that can be achieved in a virtual set environment, he adds. “That is where the video game renderers have really come into play with the level of 3D and photorealism you can achieve, but still run that in real time.”

When paired with the Blacktrax technology, the setup allows on-screen talent and race analysts to manipulate 3D objects in the virtual set to better explain something to viewers, adds Fields.

While both Dolan and Fields declined to reveal how much the new studio cost Fox Sports, Fields describes the expenditure as “a heavy investment.”

The technology may one day have a role in the coverage of other sports by the broadcaster, but no plans have been announced.

“There’s no reason this would continue to be only a NASCAR thing. There are so many advantages,” says Fields. “It only helps productions tell their stories and make them more interesting.”

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Fox Sports is deploying a Mega Trax 500 robotic "Rail Cam" to provide a unique POV for viewers tuning into NASCAR’s iconic Coca-Cola 600-mile race at Charlotte Motor Speedway on Sunday, May 27, 2018. 

Following a successful test earlier this season at the Auto Club Speedway, in Fontana, Calif., the robotic camera can accelerate from zero to 60 MPH in three seconds, topping out at speeds over 90 MPH, with near-silent operation.

Instead of using it for pit coverage, as the network had done at the Auto Club Speedway, Fox Sports and Mega Trax will construct roughly 850 feet of rail behind the inside wall on the backstretch at Charlotte Motor Speedway to enable more interesting race coverage.

“The Mega Trax ‘Rail Cam’ fits perfectly into our long history of NASCAR coverage innovations, including Gopher Cam, Gyro Cam, and most recently, Visor Cam,” said Michael Davies, Fox Sports senior vice president, Field & Technical Operations. “We hope this will add yet another reason to watch the most compelling race of the Memorial Day weekend.”

AVONDALE, ARIZ.—Students from the Conservatory of Recording Arts & Sciences got a three-day crash course on mixing live audio and video feeds for a sports production. The subject matter was the Fox Sports broadcast of the three-day Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at ISM Raceway in Avondale, Ariz.; the students’ classroom was a 42-ft. remote production mobile broadcast trailer; and their teacher was Sports Broadcast Hall of Fame inductee Fred Aldous.

The students received the raw feed from Fox, which include all the behind-the-scenes audio discussions and directions between the directors, broadcast crews, producers, engineers and videographers. CRAS Administrator Kirt Hamm said this allowed the students to experience what a broadcast was really like. The students would then practice mixing the audio and follow the directions as they came in.

Three teams of 10-12 students each had the opportunity to train with Aldous during the three-day event.

CRAS is an 11-month program that is designed to train its students in a wide range of disciplines with professional equipment to better prepare them for their professional careers.

AVONDALE, ARIZ.—NASCAR races are fast, but it wasn’t just the speed of the race cars that a group of students from the Conservatory of Recording Arts & Sciences got to experience recently. During the three-day Good Sam 500 event at Phoenix International Raceway from March 11-13, CRAS student had the opportunity for hands-on experience of mixing live audio and video feeds from Fox Sports in the school’s 42-foot remote-production mobile broadcast trailer.

The students were divided into three teams of 10-12. They received behind-the-scenes audio discussions and directions between directors, broadcast crews, producers, engineers and videographers, according to Kirt Hamm, a CRAS administrator. The student then followed directions to practice audio mixing during the live broadcast.

CRAS is an 11-month program designed to teach broadcast audio, live sound, film and TV audio, music, and video game audio. The program has campuses in Gilbert and Tempe, Ariz. 

SAN FRANCISCO—When it comes to integrating new audio and video technologies into a stadium, the fan experience comes into play more and more. And that demand for more camera angles and slo-mo replays that fans are used to seeing on their home TV screens is impacting the design of even bigger screens at the stadiums.

Particularly in a sports environment, the technology in front of the audience and behind the scenes have to work seamlessly hand in hand.

Systems integrators have taken that notion to heart. Over the last several years, companies like TSE Services in Scottsdale, Ariz., have devoted much of their audio/video services integration to sporting environments, from minor league ballparks to major league soccer stadiums.

To enhance the ballpark experience for fans of the Charlotte (N.C.) Knights, TSE partnered with Toshiba Managed Business Services to install one of Minor League Baseball’s most spacious and brightest scoreboards at the team’s home BB&T Ballpark.SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
Most recently, the company finished up two sports install efforts in the south, with audio and video installs at WesBanco Arena, home of the ice hockey team the Wheeling Nailers in West Virginia as well as a Minor League baseball park—Joseph P. Riley, Jr. Park—that hosts the Charleston RiverDogs in South Carolina.

The goal of both of those audio and video installations was to enhance the fan experience, TSE said.

The Nailers project in West Virginia was centralized around the addition of new digital ribbon boards and a high-definition center- mounted video board. Partnering with Cincinnati-based landscape lighting manufacturer LSI Industries, TSE was responsible for designing, relocating and installing a new high-definition production room to support the new displays. Technology included a NewTek TriCaster 860 video switcher and NewTek 3Play for instant replays and wireless fan cams.

Likewise, the RiverDogs project in South Carolina was focused on streamlining audio around the ballpark and enhancing the instadium communication and video systems. Audio amplifiers were installed to break the ballpark into multiple digital zones that would allow stadium A/V operators to change the sound level as needed in different locations throughout the ballpark. Technology additions included a Canon XU-81W HD remote PTZ camera in center field, along with new ticket window intercom systems.

The goal of the technological investment was to take attendees’ video and audio experience to a new level, according to Jamel Mallad, TSE project manager for the installation.

The common theme for many of today’s sports stadium installations is digital: largescale video boards, digital signage, menu boards, video walls and digital audio. That same focus went into TSE’s designs at stadiums like BB&T Ballpark in Charlotte, N.C. and the Durham Bulls Athletic Park in Durham, N.C.

But sometimes the technology has to take a less obtrusive role when it comes to preserving the atmosphere in a location— whether that’s a modern take on a slick new hockey arena or maintaining the rustic feel of a minor league ballpark in rural Vermont.

That was the case during the revamp of Centennial Field in Burlington, Vt., when TSE was tasked with installing a high-definition video board into an existing wooden structure that resembled an old mining shed far more than a modern billboard. The integrator worked with LSI Industries to install a 27x16-foot video board and integrated a new digital production room with TSE’s GameTime ScriptPRO game management system, a cloud-based event management SaaS solution designed to organize and execute event scripts.

The Durham (N.C.) Bulls Minor League Baseball team contracted with TSE to overhaul the team’s audio-visual system, which included a new HD game operations production room and improved sound system.FIXED VERSUS NON-FIXED
That same level of attention is required whether the game is played in a small stadium or within the big leagues. NEP’s rising prominence in covering major sporting events came from a two-fold happenstance: networks declining to invest in their own proprietary broadcast facilities in the field, and the real-world experience that outside broadcast production companies have continued to gain in sports-specific production.

That’s not to say, of course, that the experts don’t experience a blip from time to time: There is still discussion about what exactly caused a power outage during the World Series Game 1, though it’s been reported that when Fox lost power to its generators, it knocked out the signal from the NEP production truck that was responsible for airing the domestic feed for the World Series coverage.

In addition to herculean efforts to avoid on-air snafus, what defines sports productions is their similarity to one another, said George Hoover, chief technology officer of the NEP Group. In its 31-year history, which began humbly as part of the WNEP-TV in Scranton, Pa., the mobile production company has covered regional baseball, college football, tennis, soccer, ultimate fighting, professional golf and beyond.

“The biggest challenges are that you’re working in the field, and you have to build from scratch,” Hoover said, which can mean diverse challenges such as deploying fiber throughout an older stadium or outfitting HD cameras in locations where there is no connectivity.

“In regularly occurring venues—like basketball and hockey—this isn’t an issue, but for events like golf or NASCAR when there’s not a regular venue, we have to install cabling infrastructure and take it out afterward,” he said. “There’s a lot of logistics,” particularly for those sporting events that depend heavily upon instant replay, like NFL playoff games or the World Series.”

In an entertainment venue like the Grammys, there are multiple musical acts back to back to contend with, which offers its own challenges. But in a sporting event, there are also ancillary elements like large HD screens and scoreboards for playback materials.

During this year’s World Series coverage, NEP employed a larger number of high-speed slow-motion cameras. “When you’re capturing an image at the higher frame rate of 480 fps or 1,000 fps, it gives you the ability to freeze the ball to see if the runner hit the bag first, or if the fly ball was out of bounds,” Hoover said. “[A lot of our current setups] depend on higher-speed replay cameras and specialized POV cameras, like the ESPN goal-line cameras, or cameras on pylons,” he said, noting that NEP has been using Sony HDC- 4300 4K cameras and Vision Research high-speed cameras.

Sports production also has specific requirements when it comes to storage. “When you go to a higher frame rate, you’re storing more material, which means you need larger hard drives,” he said. It also takes longer to play that content back. “In reality you can’t get more than one or two high-speed replays in before [the play starts again].”

BeckTV is one company that has dived into the sports production realm as well, having completed an HD upgrade of a 48-foot expando mobile production truck as well as having designed a large-scale flypack used at the 2014 French Open tennis tournament.

Recently the Austin-Texas-based company completed a significant renovation of the Dr. Pepper Ballpark in Frisco, Texas. Home to the Frisco RoughRiders, a Class AA minor league baseball team, BeckTV provided design and integration work for the ballpark in an effort to enhance the fan experience, including an upgraded sound system and new Daktronics LED displays driven by a new HD video replay control room.

STAMFORD, CONN. – All cylinders were firing in terms of viewers for NBC Sports Network’s telecast of NASCAR Sprint Cup’s Brickyard 400 on Sunday, July 26, as the race became the network’s most-watched telecast. The race, which was held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, averaged 4.7 million viewers, peaking at 5.6 million when Kyle Busch took home the checkered flag.

The Brickyard 400 telecast marks consecutive weeks of growth for NBCSN’s coverage of Sprint Cup racing. Average viewership was up 27 percent from the July 19 race in New Hampshire, and 47 percent from the July 11 race in Kentucky. NBCSN’s coverage was the most-watched NASCAR event on cable since the 2014 season-ending race that aired on ESPN and drew in 5.2 million.

NBCSN’s next NASCAR race will be the Windows 10 400 and will air Sunday, Aug. 2 at 1:30 p.m. from Pocono Raceway in Long Pond, Pa.

STAMFORD, CONN. -  NBC Sports is putting the pedal to the metal as it prepares to launch its coverage of NASCAR Sprint Cup races. As part of its coverage, NBC Sports’ live streaming product, NBC Sports Live Extra, will offers fans exclusive camera angles, custom driver information, and insider track information during all races.

NBC Sports Live Extra multi-view options combine the NBC’s race simulcast with alternative camera angles, including in-car views, full-view on-board alternate cameras, and various locations on the track. Fans will also be able to access race day information like driver updates and bios, cup standings, and track infographics. NBC Sports Live Extra will stream coverage of NASCAR races from both NBC and NBCSN.

The Fourth of July weekend will kick off NBC Sports Group’s 10-year deal as the home of the NASCAR Sprint Championship, starting with the Subway Firecracker 250 NASCAR XFINITY Series race on Saturday on NBCSB, July 4 at 7 p.m. ET, and continuing with the Coke Zero 400 on Sunday, July 5 at 7 p.m. ET on NBC.