
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
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
22/05/2026
Germany's Magenta TV, which will have 44 exclusive FIFA World Cup match broa...
22/05/2026
DAZN, the world's leading sports entertainment platform, has acquired global broadcast rights to the International Federation of American Football's ( I...
22/05/2026
ATHLOS, the all-women's professional track and field league, has announced i...
22/05/2026
The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) today announced that the 47th Annual Sports Emmy Awards and the 47th Annual News & Documentary Emmy A...
22/05/2026
Wooden Camera today announced the release of new accessories for the Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive. The new lineup includes a redesigned Top Plate and Side Rai...
22/05/2026
YES Network and OTT Advisors have announced a sixth consecutive season of their streaming partnership, continuing their collaboration on the Gotham app. OTT Adv...
22/05/2026
NESN, New England's premier sports network, will again turn its camera to Fe...
22/05/2026
Dale Pro Audio is hosting an RF over Fiber Livestream Webinar on May 28 from 1-2:30 pm EST. With major sporting events and large-scale productions putting incre...
22/05/2026
Audio-Technica has announced key leadership appointments designed to further strengthen its sales organization and drive continued growth across the Americas. M...
22/05/2026
After nearly four decades shaping the global combat sports landscape, Scott Coker has announced a powerful return as he looks to build a new international mixed...
22/05/2026
Skyline Communications, the company behind the globally deployed DataMiner xOps platform, today announced the launch of xOps Vanguard Runway, a strategic accele...
22/05/2026
For the fully onsite production, 30 cameras - including a SkyCam and Megalodon - will capture the action in Texas
One of the world's biggest rodeo producti...
22/05/2026
Leading Argentina-based sports media company Torneos y Competencias S.A. has modernized its playout operations, implementing a fully redundant, multichannel env...
22/05/2026
As the 2026 Major League Pickleball season kicks off this weekend in Dallas, it ...
22/05/2026
Shure has become a minority investor in Edge Sound Research, a start-up company that is developing new experiential audio technologies that redefine how many au...
22/05/2026
In advance of this year's Sports Emmy Awards, SVG is taking a deep dive into...
22/05/2026
The National Hockey League (NHL) and Amazon Music announced that GRAMMY Award-winning superstar Jelly Roll will provide the official theme song of the 2026 Stan...
22/05/2026
David Pogue will keynote SVV Summer Camp and discuss Apple at 50: How the World...
22/05/2026
In its second year as rightsholder, FOX Sports goes bigger across the board for ...
22/05/2026
Heading into FOX Sports' second Indianapolis 500, Lead Director Mitch Riggin...
22/05/2026
At our 2026 Investor Day, we shared an inside look at the rebuild of our advertising business. This pivot to our own purpose-built platform is already driving s...
22/05/2026
Podcasting on Spotify continues to grow, and so do the ways listeners engage with it. At Investor Day 2026, we shared how we're building the next chapter of...
22/05/2026
Limited-time collections now available
Restoration experts CEDAR Audio have recently launched a new line of Icons plug-ins that make their powerful processo...
22/05/2026
Three new classics join Model Pass line-up
Boss' PX-1 Plugout Pedal offers an innovative approach to guitar pedals, providing users with a hardware stom...
22/05/2026
At its Meitingen site, SGL Carbon has implemented two key projects to further de...
22/05/2026
Statement regarding 2026 National NAIDOC Lifetime Achievement Award for the late...
22/05/2026
Latest data reveals steady distributor rankings, a seasonal shift toward digital...
22/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
22/05/2026
Amagi Media Labs Limited (NSE: AMAGI, BSE: 544679), a cloud-native SaaS platform providing AI-enabled solutions to global media and entertainment companies, tod...
22/05/2026
An nima Post Relies on Cintel to Revive Classic Mexican Films
Brie Clayton May 22, 2026
0 Comments
Film scanner and DaVinci Resolve Studio help manage...
22/05/2026
Boris FX Sapphire Adds Optical Beauty and Hypnotic Textures
Jessie Electa Petrov May 22, 2026
0 Comments
The 2026.5 release introduces advanced defocu...
22/05/2026
Deployment Preserves Trusted Workflows While Enabling a Path to UHD and SMPTE ST 2110
Leading Argentina-based sports media company Torneos y Competencias S.A....
22/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
22/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
22/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
22/05/2026
Back to All News
Ex-Husband, Current Husband, One Wild Rescue: Korean Action Co...
22/05/2026
Catch the latest in Irish music live from venues such as Whelan's, R is n Du...
21/05/2026
Game Creek Video Columbia and Celtic, NEP Supershooter 8 will house onsite produ...
21/05/2026
Freshly graduated, this upstart producer, director, and camera operator is already working as an AP on videoboard shows for the Philadelphia Phillies
In the li...
21/05/2026
Media Links has announced a channel partnership with Clearcast Asia, a broadcast...
21/05/2026
SiriusXM and NASCAR have announced a multi-year renewal of their broadcasting agreement. SiriusXM will continue to carry live broadcasts of every NASCAR Cup Ser...
21/05/2026
Audio-Technica held a demonstration event at its Technica House location in New ...
21/05/2026
Ateme has announced that RTL Deutschland has selected Ateme's software-based...
21/05/2026
LiveU has announced that BCC Live deployed the LU900Q intelligent production unit for the first time during the 2026 Memorial Hermann IRONMAN Texas North Americ...
21/05/2026
ATSC has announced that Mark Aitken, President of ONE Media and Senior VP of Advanced Technology at Sinclair Broadcast Group, will receive the 2026 Mark Richer ...
21/05/2026
BBright has published a technical analysis of the Media eXchange Layer (MXL), de...