New possibilities: Creating a new production company with a difference at Momentum Broadcast By Heather McLean Friday, May 2, 2025 - 10:11
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The core Momentum Broadcast team is made up of freelancers that all know each other from working at ITN and on World Athletics Productions (WAP). They are now in the thick of production on the new Grand Slam Track series
The team at Momentum Broadcast has all worked together at ITN and on World Championships at World Athletics Productions (WAP), the joint venture between governing body World Athletics and ITN. When ITN lost the contract for World Athletics, the WAP crew knew they were being made redundant.
Mark Fulton, executive producer at Momentum Broadcast, explains what happened once the ITN WAP team found out that their termination was imminent. It was a really weird year because we were coming out the contract, but we still had 12 months to do with World Athletics Productions. We knew that we were all being made redundant at the end of the year.
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As a team at WAP we were always very close, continues Fulton. Clair [Goodwin, Momentum director], Anneka [Radley-Hodges, Momentum Broadcast senior producer], myself, Melanie-Jane Clark, who's our head of production, and Mickey [Payne, Momentum senior director and head of quality] and Shabir [Sharif, Momentum head of rights holder services], we were all quite a tight close team.
We always thought there was something out there that we could do that was different, but we couldn't quite put our finger on what it was, until we gradually thought, right, we will set up a production company .
I set up the company and everybody is freelance, continues Fulton. We decided to come together as a group of people with a huge amount of experience that had worked across all major sporting events. We put this team together on the understanding that we might get stuff in, we might get stuff that certain people might not work on. We always knew that there were certain elements of maybe smaller projects or bigger projects where we could upscale and downscale if we needed to. As a team, we always worked well together and we just wanted to try and keep the team together in some form if we could.
The inaugural Grand Slam Track was held in Kingston, Jamaica on on 4 to 6 April
New possibilities
That was when, while still at ITN on the WAP contract, Grand Slam Track appeared on the horizon. Under the guise of Momentum, Fulton began conversations with Grand Slam Track around 12 months ago, after its team approached him about the possibility. He went to LA a couple of times for meetings with Rick Qualliotine, chief content officer at Grand Slam Track.
While there the idea was born to create a joint venture production company with US-based Carr Hughes Productions and Momentum Broadcast in order to service the host broadcast of Grand Slam Track. The new venture is called M-CHP and is one Grand Slam Track-down, with three more in the US to go.
Fulton explains: When Grand Slam Track came along, we put our budgets together with Carr Hughes Productions. We're not setting up a traditional production company; we could never compete with your Whispers, your Sunset+Vines, your IMGs, as a group of people. We could all probably be employed by them, but as a company it would be very difficult to compete with them because of the scale of them.
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One of the frustrations that I think that we all had [during our careers] is that you always want to try and do a little bit more on a production and there's never the budget there to do it. If you are with a traditional production company, there's always a production fee, so straight away, if you are looking at a million dollar budget or a million pound budget, you're losing a hundred thousand of that on a 10% production fee. So therefore then you put your overheads on top of that, then you put your taxing on top of that as well, it's a lot.
We wondered how we could do this differently, in a way that gave more value to a governing body, that gave more value to a broadcaster, that gave more value to a local organising committee.
Team spirit
Fulton says team spirit is at the core of what Momentum is about. For us it is about working and just continuing to work and wanting to work, not wanting to make massive amounts of money out of something; if I wanted to do that, I'd have gone and done a different job, if I'm honest with you, but I'd been involved in broadcasting for 35 years and I love it and I'm passionate about it and we all just want to make great television.
Read more High benchmark: Inside the inaugural Grand Slam Track production from Jamaica
We all want to do something that's different. We all want to try and innovate as much as we can. And I think that as long as we were all earning a living, and as long as the company is covering its costs there is a small overhead we are quite happy just to see what's out there. If further projects came in, what we always said was that we would cherry pick people to come in and do stuff. I have no experience in certain sports, Anneka might not have experience in certain sports, so therefore what we will do is bring other people in to do those jobs. And again, we're not looking to make money out of it; we're looking just to try and keep a quality of production as high as possible.
I think that when you can be completely open and completely transparent that's what the invoice is, that's what it costs, that's what your AR costs, that's what your technology costs people can't argue with that, continues Fulton. And
