The American Rodeo Takes Over Globe Life Field for Championship Weekend

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 productions returns to Globe Life Field, the Arlington, TX, home of the Texas Rangers. Beginning tonight, The American Rodeo Championship Weekend, with a $2 million potential payout across the two-day event, will air on FOX platforms and on Cowboy and The Cowboy Channel.

The American Rodeo is one of the most prestigious rodeo events in the world, so there is a lot of excitement heading into this weekend, says Don Cardona, VP, live events and broadcast operations, Teton Ridge/The Cowboy Channel. The opportunity for contestants to compete for $2 million is obviously a major storyline, but, beyond that, we are excited to showcase some of the best rodeo athletes in the world on a major stage.

The Texas Rangers' Globe Life Field is transformed from a ballpark into a venue fit for rodeo competition. (Photos: Don Cardona)Producing a rodeo broadcast is naturally complex, given the various subfloors, steel, dirt, livestock, athlete safety, cable, and venue modifications required. That makes this kind of production challenging, Cardona notes, but it also makes it rewarding. When everything comes together, you are able to bring fans much closer to the sport and help tell the story of the contestants, the animal athletes, and the event in a way that feels big, polished, and true to rodeo.

For the Cowboy fully onsite production, the compound in the ballpark's loading dock houses two mobile units. Pure Mobile Royal, 53-ft. expando, serves as main production truck, with a dedicated support unit for engineering and technology.

BitFire provides technical operations, live media workflows, and artificial-intelligence integrations via its cloud production platform, and 2Twelve Productions oversees production operations, engineering, and logistics.

Cameras are spread throughout the ballpark to capture the best possible angles for each discipline within the competition. A pre-/post-show set is on the concourse near the left-field foul pole.

From a production standpoint, says Cardona, we are looking forward to covering the sport at a very high level, with a strong camera complement, enhanced graphics, and super-slo-mo replay coverage.

What makes this production even more compelling, he continues, is the coordination of four independent productions sharing resources across the weekend. This allows us to create real efficiencies throughout the production while still delivering a premium broadcast, streaming experience, and in-venue product.

The coverage will be produced fully onsite at Globe Life Field. Friday's semifinals broadcast starts at 8:30 p.m. ET on FS2. Saturday's two performances will air on FS1 (1:30 p.m.) and FOX (5 p.m.).

Cowboy will also offer pre- and post-show coverage on Friday, two pre-shows on Saturday, and a final post-show to conclude the weekend's events. The studio shows will be produced REMI-style from the control room in the Fort Worth Stockyards.

In the compound, Pure Mobile Royal serves as main production truck for The American Rodeo Championship Weekend.The on-air talent will be onsite. For the pre-/post-shows, camera and audio feeds and communications will be transmitted via the BitFire Network to the Cowboy control room in Fort Worth. A return feed will be sent back to Globe Life Field with minimal latency.

Teton Ridge/The Cowboy Channel recently moved into the Armour Building in the Fort Worth Stockyards and soft-launched its studio in late March. Unfortunately, buildout of the permanent control room has been delayed by a furniture backorder, Cardona explains.

As a result, Key Code Media, Teton Ridge's integrator, constructed a temporary control room using the media company's existing broadcast gear. Even though temporary, it is a fully integrated control room that will eventually be moved into the permanent space (Pinnacle designed the studio desk for the company).

According to Cardona, The American Rodeo Championship will be the biggest broadcast coverage of rodeo outside of the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo. For event coverage, the production deploys 30 cameras, including 12 operated units (handheld and hard) and multiple 4X-super-slo-mo cameras with 100X lenses. Overhead PTZ cameras are used for replay official review as well as for action coverage.

SkyCam - operated by Kroenke Sports & Entertainment GM/COO/CTO, SkyCam & CableCam, Stephen Wharton and his team - will be used for beauty shots, live action, and augmented-reality graphics. A shallow-depth-of-field Megalodon will be deployed on the dirt, and another RF handheld, supported by AVS, will allow the team to gather coverage throughout the entire lower bowl of the venue. Three PTZ cameras and an RF handheld will capture the pre-/post-shows.

In terms of bells and whistles, Teton Ridge/The Cowboy Channel plans to use its well-documented AIQ technology to enhance coverage. Per Cardona, BitFire's transmission solution will encode the onsite scoring data with broadcast cameras and deliver a data-trimmed replay clip to TWGAi for real-time data aggregation.

The pre- and post-show set is located on the concourse of Globe Life Field near the left-field foul pole.The video information is processed by TWGAI, Palantir, and NVIDIA using proprietary artificial intelligence to create skeleton overlays on the animal athlete and rider for rough-stock events and speed and time tracers for barrel racing. These fully rendered elements traverse this cloud-adjacent, AI-enhanced workflow so quickly that they can be used within the broadcast, says Cardona, adding that the AIQ technology debuted only a year ago.

The production's overarching goal is to highlight the contestants and animal athletes, showcase the intricacies of

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