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...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
Fanatical fans: IMG on bringing the world of table tennis to a new global audience for WTT By Heather McLean 
