All the Bells and Whistles: Delivering Top Flight NFL Games With a European Twist

All the bells and whistles: Delivering top flight NFL games with a European twist By Michael Burns

Thursday, October 27, 2022 - 17:00

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On the NFL set of Good Morning Football overlooking Tower Bridge

With the NFL International Series now established in London, and regular season games playing to packed Wembley and Tottenham Hotspur Stadiums, NFL Media is about to bring all the razzamatazz of American Football to Munich's Allianz Arena.

The Seattle Seahawks are set to take on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on 13 November for the first-ever NFL regular-season game in Germany. And according to Dave Shaw, vice president, head of media operations at NFL Network and nfl.com, great plans are afoot ahead of the game in the home of reigning Bundesliga champions FC Bayern M nchen. NFL Network (the pay-tv arm of NFL Media) is setting up in an old branch of Deutsche Bank looking onto the iconic square in the city, Marienplatz.

All week long leading up to the game we'll bring our Good Morning Football show from Munich, Shaw tells SVG Europe. It's an interesting time there; it's just after Oktoberfest and they're starting to set up for Christmas, and Marienplatz becomes a whole Christmas Village. But that's the kind of iconic scene that we wanted, with the City Hall, the Rathaus-Glockenspiel clock and all the architecture there. We like to be in the middle of the people and show off the city.

We've taken down a wall in there, so it has nice window views of Marienplatz; we're getting that all connected, adds Shaw. We're sending our talent there to host all week long, and to build anticipation for the game.

All the bells and whistles

Shaw oversees all the operations engineering for the NFL Media group, whether it's our studio operations as well as the live games and any remotes that we do .

In this case [live game coverage of the international games], we use Fox Sports to produce the games for us, but I've got oversight of the operations and technical pieces, he adds.

In terms of production, Shaw says that the international games are very similar to what NFL Network has done for its Thursday night games over the past few years. They're strikingly similar in size, and we try to keep that high level, he adds. There's not much difference in those coverages.

As for talent, viewers get the full-blown high end NFL Network production experience on international games. We cover it just the same way, says Shaw. We have our booth talent, both primary and play-by-play, as well as sideline reporters on both sides for covering both teams. We have a long pre-game show, as well as a post-game show. On NFL Network, we have a little longer window to put our pregame on to lead up to the game - in the States, the international games go on pretty early, for the East Coast, it's 09:30, while out on the West Coast the game is at 06:30. So it's a little early for some folks. We'll come on two and a half hours earlier, but it's great in a lot of ways. Nobody else is having a game at that point, so it's a nice window to watch the game.

Typically, these post and pre-game shows are remotely produced from the NFL's facility next to SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, while the actual game coverage is produced on-site.

The team we use to support NFL in London is EMG Live, Shaw adds. Whether it's NFL Network, or whether it's CBS or whether it's Fox, whoever goes to London usually uses their trucks and cabling facilities.

EMG's Nova 111 OB unit was the primary truck used at the Spurs stadium for both of NFL's London games in October

A-level show

This also includes deploying around 25 cameras, all shooting 1080p HD. Adds Shaw: That would be an A-level show for any network broadcast. It's like conference championship level in the States, only to be outdone by the Super Bowl, pretty much, so there's plenty of coverage.

New for the International games is the Cart Camera, a manned camera unit mounted on a motorised dolly that moves up and down the sidelines with the play. It is a fixture at US games.

If you watch the football in the United States, you're very much expecting [the cart camera], says Shaw. It's really there for primary coverage but it can show the replays - and we expect so much out of those replays. Having [it on] a near side and a far side gives you close-ups and you can get that reverse angle.

We also have a sky cam, which again has become one of the most used cameras and is a signature of all NFL games, he adds. In this case, we use Spidercam as the vendor in the international games.

We have some remote cameras, where we can't get to certain locations we have one in the booth, for example, so we can keep people on, he continues. We also have some point-of-view cameras and we do have some robotic cameras, but for the most part we're using manned cameras.

As for audio, all NFL games, including the internationals, have mics all over the stadium to gather the crowd noise. NFL Film supplies the microphones, explains Shaw. We have mics located everywhere, on the sidelines as well. They support all the league games with microphones on the centre and in place so that you can catch the quarterback making his calls. That's all part of the action. There's a whole set of rules that work specifically with NFL broadcasting to make sure that you don't have an up [mic] when you're not supposed to. All the teams know that the microphone is going to get brought up when he's hiking the ball and all, but it won't be on when they're in a huddle. That's standard for everybody, and it's pretty good.

We have a little artificial intelligence (AI) going as well, to deliver some scoring and graphics pieces that we overlay on the f

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