Fanatical fans: IMG on bringing the world of table tennis to a new global audience for WTT By Heather McLean
Monday, April 8, 2024 - 12:25
Print This Story
IMG works in partnership with World Table Tennis to create an exciting new broadcast for the sport
IMG is the production partner for World Table Tennis (WTT), an association that was created in 2021 to grow the sport internationally. While WTT developed the overall image of the series, IMG has been responsible for creating the production and bringing the sport to life on TV screens. From his base in Singapore, SVG Europe spoke to Rob Peile, vice president of production in Asia for IMG, to find out more.
When did you get involved with WTT and how do you work together?
We entered into our long term strategic partnership with WTT in January 2021. We actually did our first event for them at the tail end of 2020, which was in Macau, which is where it really came alive. We just wanted to help them grow the sport and see what the potential of the sport was, not only from a visual perspective, but from a distribution standpoint.
I think the great thing about our partnership is we really do work hand in glove. WTT, from a creative perspective, came out with a really great, strong brand for WTT, and they also had some really great concepts of how they were going to transform the arena experience what I would call the field of play and how it was going to look, the feel, the darker colours, and step away from always having four table tennis tables in a big sports hall together, to having one really incredible feature court.
As producers, as IMG, that's fantastic because that then gives you the ability to concentrate your cameras on what I would call a clean field of play. You don't have to worry about other games happening in the same hall. You can drop the lights, you can create a mood. And so when we came on board, hearing what WTT's plans were for the sport was really inspiring for us as producers.
Once we had the general look and feel of what WTT wanted to achieve, and the branding, and the colours and all of those things, we then spent a lot of time talking about how the arena was going to be laid out, what the entrances were going to be, where the screens were going to be, where our cameras could be. And it was really a collaborative experience right from the very beginning, and it was really rich and rewarding; as producers, a lot of the time, you just get given what you have to shoot, but we felt like we really added value and we were coming at it from lots of different angles.
We found a really fantastic consensus in how WTT could be presented to the global stage.
Read more Ping pong for the masses: Bringing an old sport to a brand new audience with World Table Tennis
What has been your overall goal with the WTT productions?
Table tennis, like every sport, has a lot of fanatical fans, and they'll watch table tennis regardless of how it's shot, regardless of who's playing. What we really wanted to do was open up table tennis to a brand new audience, an audience that maybe didn't really understand how fast-paced the game was, how agile the athletes were.
Very rarely, as producers, do you get a chance or an opportunity to reinvent a sport. We literally had a blank sheet of paper. And that was incredibly exciting to be a part of.
IMG uses its internal company, fibre service provider Cingularity, for distribution of signals from the WTT events via Cingularity's fibre and back to Stockley Park for global distribution on IP, as opposed to satellite, which has been very successful, says Peile. We've done that not only with WTT in the Asian region, but we've done that on our LPGA jobs as well. So delivering more of our signals via IP is an area that I think will definitely grow and expand in the future.
What is the most innovative thing you have implemented for this production?
So the big change that we made was the main camera, what we call the main camera angle, that the sport is presented. The sport was traditionally presented from a side-on camera, a little bit like tennis, so you see the length of the court.
Because we'd only really had exposure watching table tennis on the Olympics every four years, it wasn't something that was on our radar. What we really discovered with the camera angle that had been traditionally used year after year, decade after decade, is that a lot of the gameplay was actually blocked by one of the players; one of the players was always in front of a very small ball.
We started experimenting with moving that camera to a three quarter shot, and then to a side shot. Once we watched the game being played from a side shot, we were staggered ourselves at how much the players move around and how fast the game is.
We sold this idea to WTT that this really gives more onus on the athleticism of the athletes, because you can see it. You can really see how fast the game is. Also the distances and the reaction times that these guys and girls react to are staggering to watch. When table tennis is good, it is electric. And that's what it's really brought out to the viewers globally.
The arena for the Singapore Smash takes traditional viewing of ping pong and turns it into a spectacle for viewers
And what about the graphics? They are important to show new viewers what's going on in the game.
One of the things we really wanted to do was refresh the graphics to give them a much more modern and clean look. Once we had the field of play to work with, it was pretty obvious what we needed to do with the graphics. The good thing about having IMG work so closely with WTT and not an independent production company that doesn't have a really close relationship is we designed a set of graphics, and then we looked at how that was going to work
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
07/08/2025
July 8 2025, 22:30 (PDT) Tata Motors & Dolby Bring Dolby Atmos to Harrier.ev, R...
14/07/2025
The Royal Moroccan Air Force hosted a C-130 award ceremony with L3Harris Technologies President of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Jason Lambert a...
14/07/2025
UK launch set for September, following on from recent US and Germany releases
London - UK, July 14, 2025 - Nielsen, a global leader in audience measurement, da...
14/07/2025
SHENZHEN, China Telycam has added control options for its portfolio of pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras with a new plug-in for Elgato's Stream Deck family of con...
14/07/2025
The awards are open to IBC2025 show exhibitors and offer a valuable platform for companies to raise awareness for the new products and solutions they will be la...
14/07/2025
Clear-Com is excited to announce a significant expansion of the award-winning Arcadia Central Station with new software updates. Together, these releases dram...
14/07/2025
Grass Valley and Daktronics today announced a strategic technology partnership that unites Grass Valley's live production expertise with Daktronics' lea...
14/07/2025
Cloud playout solutions provider, Veset, and swXtch.io, provider of cloud-based multicast and reliable networking solutions, are partnering to deliver multicast...
14/07/2025
Tintri , a DDN subsidiary and leader in AI-powered data management solutions, today announces a game-changing and award-winning refresh to its global Partner P...
14/07/2025
HighField AI, the broadcast industry's first agentic and multimodal AI platform for automating graphics production, is now commercially available. Developed...
14/07/2025
Encompass Digital Media has today announced that it has been delivering a complex global services project for DAZN, the world s leading sports entertainment pla...
14/07/2025
MASV (massive.io), the fastest, most reliable large file transfer platform trusted by over 10,000 global organizations, announced today it will showcase its nex...
14/07/2025
Calrec is introducing a series of usability, customisation and system enhancements across the entire range of Argo consoles at IBC 2025, on Stand 8.C47. Look ou...
14/07/2025
Fincons Group, IT business consultancy and systems integrator company with more than 40 years of experience in the market, is proud to announce a new engagement...
14/07/2025
Stand 5.F45, IBC2025, Amsterdam, 12 15 September 2025 Intinor returns to IBC to present the latest updates to its Direkt series. A key development on show is ...
14/07/2025
Sony's New Coach's Headset Was Designed in Collaboration With the NFL Featuring a custom dynamic boom mic, the headset will debut in the fall By Dan Da...
14/07/2025
Live From MLB All-Star 2025: MLB Network's Marc Caiafa and Tom Guidice on th...
14/07/2025
Back to All News
Netflix ISP Speed Index for June 2025
Product
14 July 2025
Global
Link copied to clipboard
One percent of Internet Service Providers (ISP...
14/07/2025
Back to All News
Netflix Begins Filming The Map of Longing With Al cia Falc , P...
14/07/2025
This July marks 100 days since I officially stepped into the role of CEO at Grass Valley, a milestone not of abrupt change, but of confident continuity.
Unlike...
14/07/2025
Enhancing Public Service Broadcasting with
Innovation, Accuracy & Sustainability
New regional detail and local towns featured...
13/07/2025
Back to All News
Netflix Expands B&B Universe' with Yu Jae Seok's B&B ...
13/07/2025
Live From MLB All-Star 2025: MLB Network Marks Five Straight Years of Onsite MLB...
12/07/2025
Ryan Coogler accepting the 2013 Vanguard Award. Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez.
Editor's Note: In honor of Fruitvale Station s 12th anniversary, we're d...
12/07/2025
Key Code Education, the professional training division of Key Code Media, proudly announces a major update to its Adobe Premiere Pro Engineering and Advanced Op...
12/07/2025
Key Code Education, a leader in instructor-led post production training for over...
12/07/2025
As the death toll continues to mount, with at least 120 killed and more than 170 people still missing on July 10 from devastating Texas floods, a number of broa...
12/07/2025
EL SEGUNDO, Calif., and MIAMI -DirecTV and TelevisaUnivision have signed a deal that will make the ad-supported premium subscription tier of ViX, ViX Premium wi...
11/07/2025
PARK CITY, UTAH, July 11, 2025 - The nonprofit Sundance Institute announced today the 11 producers chosen for its annual Producers Labs, returning to Ucross Fou...
11/07/2025
If you've ever wondered what might be playing in Clark Kent's headphones...
11/07/2025
L3Harris Technologies President of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Jason Lambert and General Manager of L3Harris Waco facility Sean Ling held a ce...
11/07/2025
ARLINGTON, Va. WETA, the flagship public media station in the national capital area, has launched WETA+, a new streaming service tailored for the local Washingt...
11/07/2025
The Federal Communications Commission has emerged as one of the central players in the broadcast TV landscape in 2025, with its deregulatory policies sparking h...
11/07/2025
Calrec will introduce usability, customization and system enhancements across its entire range of Argo consoles during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Amsterda...
11/07/2025
LONDON Encompass Digital Media said it will support live and on-demand viewing of the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup across multiple global regions for sports enterta...
11/07/2025
Two-thirds of broadcast engineers reaped the benefits of a pay raise within the last year....
11/07/2025
CARY, N.C. SmallHD has launched the Quantum 27, a new 26.5-inch Quantum-Dot OLED monitor designed to deliver postproduction image quality in a compact, set-frie...
11/07/2025
The Federal Communications Commission's Enforcement Bureau and Tegna have entered into a consent decree that will settle an investigation into the accidenta...
11/07/2025
WASHINGTON Following news in early July that Paramount had settled President Donald Trump's lawsuit, Sens. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Ben Ray Luj n (D-N...
11/07/2025
Model/Actriz Performs Lead Single Cinderella on The Late Show with Stephen Colbe...
11/07/2025
Behind the Mic: Amazon Prime Preps for First Season of NBA Action; MSG Networks ...
11/07/2025
SVG New Sponsor Spotlight: Suite Studios' Craig Hering on Adapting to Client...
11/07/2025
2025 SVG Content Management Forum Breaks Down AI's Impact, Continued Transit...
11/07/2025
A Journey HOME: University of Nebraska's HuskerVision Goes IP Leaders from the HuskerVision and Lawo share their IP learnings By SVG Staff
Friday, July 1...
11/07/2025
CMSI, Remote Picture Labs, Ace ESPN's Cloud-Based Editing Efforts for Wimble...
11/07/2025
Netflix Enters the Live-Boxing-Production Ring for Round 2 With Historic Taylor-...
11/07/2025
Back to All News
Too Hot to Handle: Italy Is Coming on July 18 Only on Netflix
Entertainment
11 July 2025
GlobalItaly
Link copied to clipboard
July 11, 20...
Fanatical fans: IMG on bringing the world of table tennis to a new global audience for WTT By Heather McLean 
