(Editor’s note: UFL action begins tonight on Fox with the Birmingham Stallions taking on the Louisville Kings at 8 p.m. EDT. First week matchups continue Saturday, March 28, with the DC Defenders taking at the St. Louis Battlehawks at noon EDT on ESPN; the Houston Gamblers vs. Dallas Renegades at 4 p.m. EDT on Fox; and the Colombus Aviators at Orlando Storm on ESPN at 8 p.m. EDT.)
LOUISVILLE, Ky.—Drones over the field, cameras embedded in helmets and chest pads and Steadicam operators running on and off the field during games are only a few of the television production technologies and techniques pioneered last season by the United Football League—better known as the UFL—owned in part by Fox Corp.
No wonder then that the league is willing to push the envelope a bit when it comes to exploring ways production technology can enhance the viewing experience. While many of the same elements used last season will return for the 2026 campaign, both Fox Sports and ESPN will be relying on important enhancements behind the scenes to advance this season’s coverage, which begins tonight.
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Fiber and 5G
Signal acquisition from the field and around the venues as well as contribution back to the sports broadcasters’ respective remote production centers will benefit from enhanced tech.
Fox Sports is expanding its use of a private 5G wireless network this season, according to Brad Cheney, vice president of field operations and engineering at Fox Sports.
“We've been at the forefront of private wireless networks, and we're going to deploy them this year full time on every one of our shows” said Cheney. “We are working with CP Communications and Verizon to do that, and we're really excited to see that in daily operation every single game for us across the UFL season.”
The success of last season’s trial use of a private 5G wireless network for camera acquisition proved successful with respect to reliability and ultra-low latency, leading the broadcaster to expand its commitment to the technology.
This season, it will deploy the private wireless network to support 1080p HDR video acquisition from three cameras, including two RF handhelds and its Megalodon camera, as well as 15 wireless comms packs. Each 5G camera transmitter is “roughly the same size and weight” as its traditional COFDM counterpart, said Cheney.
Cheney noted that even though Fox Sports is deploying its own private 5G network at each UFL venue, the wireless network still exists within the broader 5G footprint of the carrier in general and more specifically of the public wireless networks at the various league venues. That fact at the moment limits how many wireless cameras the broadcaster will use on its private 5G network.
The No. 1 thing we have to work on in every single venue is understanding the other cell networks around us.
Brad Cheney, Fox Sports
“Obviously, the cell networks in the U.S. have been built around download—somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% download and 20% upload. Carriers are slowly changing that. But as that is done, it affects the people and the frequencies around you,” he said.
“The closer you get to 50-50, or inverting it to 80% [upload] and 20% [download], that's when things start affecting other things around you.”
“That's a really dynamic piece of the puzzle. The No. 1 thing we have to work on in every single venue is understanding the other cell networks around us,” said Cheney. “We’ve spent a lot of time mapping out these stadiums to figure out these things and make sure we can provide extensive coverage, not just coverage on the field.”
Cheney noted that for now, other wireless cameras—especially specialty cameras like pylon and player-worn cameras—will remain COFDM because there is no pressing need to re-engineer existing off-the-shelf traditional wireless camera backs simply to accommodate a miniaturized 5G alternative.
Like Fox Sports, ESPN is entering this UFL season with an eye towards how it can best produce games. Several new venues will be used this season. Six, including those in Washington, D.C., Orlando, Fla., Houston, Frisco, Texas, Louisville, Ky., and Columbus, Ohio, are used for professional soccer.
“A lot of these MLS [Major League Soccer] stadiums don't have the same robust fiber infrastructure that, say, an NFL stadium might have,” said Eric Kimmel, supervisor of REMI operations at ESPN.
ESPN, along with Fox Sports and the UFL worked together in the offseason to ensure sufficient fiber-optic resources would be in place prior to tonight’s season kickoff, said Jim Birch, senior manager of remote operations at ESPN.
“A lot of this planning started well in advance of the season—months in advance—doing site surveys,” said Birch. “The league, Fox and ESPN got together and looked at the infrastructure of these new venues to establish a foundational infrastructure.”
Those surveys identified a pressing need to build out the fiber infrastructure in place for the broadcasters’ UFL productions. “The league did a lot of installs,” said Birch. “It seems like we put in thousands of strands of fiber [in the aggregate] across all of these new stadiums to prepare them to produce our games.”
ESPN will make best use of available fiber bandwidth to support its REMI productions with the help of new encoding technology it first used last fall. “For the past college football season, we utilized new transmission encoders from Appear,” said Kimmel. “They were a great success.”
The encoder enables ESPN’s A Crew to transport 23 paths of HEVC-encoded 1080p HDR video back to its REMI control rooms in Bristol, Conn., and its B and C Crews to use 20 paths, he said.
School of Hard Knocks
One notable addition to the production was the use of wireless cameras embedded in select players’ chest pads. The results were mixed.
“Frankly, we learned from the chest camera last year,” said Bryan Jaroch, vice president of sports production at ESPN. “They [the league] thought it would be able to take the impact of hits, and they tested it. There were times when it did crack, or it didn’t work as well as we all had hoped.”
That lesson directed ESPN to try a different approach this season. “The chest cam cannot take that impact,” he said. “We actually tested the POVORA camera on kickers a couple of weeks ago in Arlington.” The POVORA tilt control CapCam, which ESPN used last college football season and has been nominated for a George Wensel Technical Achievement Emmy Award, may be used in other applications.
“We may try to put that on coaches or players on the sidelines. But in terms of the impact, that was one of the shortfalls with MindFly [used during the 2025 UFL season], where it could not take those hits. We’re going to work with POVORA to see what we can do with their CapCam like put it on some referees,” said Jaroch.
“They also have a BodyCam version of their cameras, so we’ll try some new technology there.”
The Ramifications
The UFL’s willingness to try innovative technologies and production techniques attracted the interest of other sports leagues throughout last season, and the efforts of Fox Sports and ESPN to implement them paid off, both broadcasters agreed.
ESPN’s Jaroch pointed to the ACC’s decision to give the sports network greater access to its replay command center during some 2025 ACC football action as an outgrowth of what the broadcaster accomplished last season with the UFL replay command center.
Fox Sports, too, points to various tech deployments during the 2025 UFL season that influenced how sports were covered in other leagues. “The automated first-and-10 setup is something the NFL did this season,” said Cheney, adding that it is one of the most visible examples.
Another is drones. “Our use of the drone at UFL games has definitely driven access across all sports,” he said.
Only time will tell how this year’s new tech deployments will influence sports production beyond the UFL.
For more information on the 2026 season, visit https://www.theufl.com/
