NBA Returns: Turner Sports Teams With League, ESPN on Made-for-TV Season With REMI MLB effort at home, the broadcaster opts for onsite NBA production By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Tuesday, August 4, 2020 - 12:41 pm
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
As Turner Sports heads into week two of the continuation of the 2020 NBA season at Disney's Wide World of Sports (WWos) facility in Orlando, Turner Sports EVP/Chief Content Officer Craig Barry is happy with the on-air product to date.
I think it has been really solid and probably surpassed a lot of expectations as a made-for-TV event, he says. We've only done two national days, but it's only going to continue to get better.
The NBA, Turner, and ESPN have embraced the made-for-TV aspect of the production in a number of ways, he notes: It comes through with the additional camera angles. And the audio comes through really well as there is a lot going on with the ambient PA; the DJ; court mics, of which are three or four times as many as usual; and the fan noise, which is driven in real time. It's the best-case scenario under the circumstances.
A massive, 28-ft. desk allows (from left) Shaquille O'Neal, Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith, and Charles Barkley to maintain social distance.
The NBA, Turner Sports, and ESPN share a 200,000-sq.-ft. compound connected to three venues: The Arena, where the main nationally televised games are held as well as the conference finals and finals; the HP Field House, for the regular season and into the second round of playoffs; and Visa Athletic Center, which hosts games broadcast primarily by a regional sports network. More than 436 miles of fiber ties everything together.
In an unusual partnership, Barry says, the NBA and ESPN have collaborated on everything from camera locations to innovations around audio and presentation. Everybody was flexible and listened to ideas, and then extensive rehearsals helped get the production baseline audio mix to a good place.
The philosophy is to have a good baseline mix before adding the announcers, he says of the audio efforts. And then there is the opportunity to take the audio streams independently and mix them up or down.
A railcam captures NBA games from a unique angle.
Turner Sports is producing its games out of NEP Supershooter 8 at The Arena, NEP TS2 at the HP Field House, and M14 at the Visa Center. The A and B units are being deployed to allow greater social distancing, and the compound features six mobile-unit cover tents, two catering tents, two field-shop tents, and multiple cooling stations.
The tents are important because they can lower the temperature of the roof skin by 20 degrees.
Tents would not make sense over a weekend, explains Chris Brown, VP, operation and technology, Turner Sports, but we will be at WWoS for three months, and that makes efficiency of AC super-important. Those are the types of things that everyone is being thoughtful about, like having extra pallets to get things off the ground in case of a hurricane.
Turner Sports is keeping as much of the production onsite as possible, given that it is deploying REMI production for MLB coverage at the Turner Broadcasting Techwood campus in Atlanta.
Robotic cameras play a big role in NBA coverage at the Wide World of Sports in Orlando.
The trickle-down effect would have impacted capacity in the TOC and then the studio and studio operations, says Brown. With baseball, we have no choice but to do REMI, and the potential collisions on a Sunday if NBA was REMI as well got us to have production teams in Orlando with trucks.
One of the challenges in Orlando is observing COVID protocols and having dedicated personnel working in one of three zones: red, yellow, and green.
The team that would put the mics in under the court had to have a chance to meet the team doing the crowd mixes and go over things at the court before the production team would go into quarantine, says Brown. And then, while the floor A2s were in quarantine, a different group would lay the cables. Once the court is declared a green zone, [personnel dedicated to] the yellow zone [are] no longer allowed on the court. So there is a lot of knowledge-sharing going on.
The Turner Sports team is not only covering the game action but also working to make the most of the media availability of coaches and players. LTN and Make.TV have created a system where upwards of 50 robotic cameras and Zoom teleconferencing systems are used to deliver interviews to a cloud-based dashboard.
From there, says Brown, we can route them to 12 decoders, and we can take them live, send them to an EVS replay server, or [make them] available as files for postproduction and delivery via NBA.com, the NBA app, or sound bites for the studio show.
That's one of the small things we're pretty excited about, he continues. The NBA had three weeks to get it installed and configured. It was turning out content last week and adds to the storytelling.
Preparations in Techwood While the team in Orlando juggled different zones and courts, the team at Techwood was ramping up to ensure that studio infrastructure and operations were ready for Inside the NBA to return to the air. One of the most well-respected sports shows on the air, the show brings together Ernie Johnson, Shaquille O'Neal, Kenny Smith, and Charles Barkley every Thursday for an entertaining and informative night of discussion and analysis.
Explains Barry, We wanted to walk before we ran so the first thing was to get the studio infrastructure up and figure out how many people we could safely have onsite, how many control rooms would we need, and to make sure we had the right amount of distance to meet safety and health guidelines. The first four shows were done with the talent remotely, but, when we knew we could get the [
North America Stories
13/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
13/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
YES Network and The Gotham Sports App will air seven Athletes Unlimited Softball...
12/06/2026
The United Football League will host its FAST Innovation Suite at the 2026 United Bowl presented by Credit One Bank on Saturday, June 13 at 3:00 p.m. ET at Audi...
12/06/2026
PTZOptics and LayerJot will present live demonstrations at InfoComm 2026 showing how natural-language AI prompting, robotic camera control, and on-device comput...
12/06/2026
MultiDyne Video and Fiber Optic Systems will exhibit at InfoComm 2026, featuring...
12/06/2026
Ateme has announced that Eurovision Services is using Ateme's software-based frame-rate conversion technology for international live event workflows. The de...
12/06/2026
Bitmovin and Simplestream have announced a partnership with Xperi to simplify the launch of OTT streaming services on TiVo OS smart TVs and devices. The collabo...
12/06/2026
Net Insight has announced that a multinational technology company is deploying a...
12/06/2026
MLB Players Inc., the business arm of the MLB Players Association, has announced a partnership with Athletes First to develop and sell brand partnerships across...
12/06/2026
Guntermann and Drunck (G&D) and VuWall have announced the CommandKeyboard-Advanc...
12/06/2026
Comcast Smart Solutions announces a new smart technology deployment with Major L...
12/06/2026
Elevation Worship completed the initial leg of its Elevation Nights 2026 tour ...
12/06/2026
AJA Video Systems has announced KONA IP25 support for Colorfront Transkoder and ...
12/06/2026
Audinate Group Limited (ASX: AD8) will exhibit at InfoComm 2026 (Booth C7321, Ce...
12/06/2026
Pac-12 Commissioner Teresa Gould has announced the appointment of Scott Adametz as Chief Technology Officer. The Pac-12 describes the hire as the first CTO appo...
12/06/2026
Grass Valley has announced AMPP Edge Live, a production system combining Grass Valley hardware, NVIDIA Blackwell GPU acceleration, and AMPP OS in a single platf...
12/06/2026
At one time a trailblazer with the launch of the Longhorn Network, the Universit...
12/06/2026
Ratings Roundup is a rundown of recent rating news and is derived from press rel...
12/06/2026
Chyron has announced PAINT 10.4, an update to its illustrated replay and sports ...
12/06/2026
SVP, Production Mark Gross: With the new schedule, with not having every Sunday night, it's given us an opportunity to take a step back and reimagine what ...
12/06/2026
For Televisa Technical Engineering Manager Roberto N nez Ibarra and the small team of 12 technicians and two production personnel at the IBC things are already ...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
AJA Announces KONA IP25 Integration with Colorfront Software
Brie Clayton June 12, 2026
0 Comments
Collaboration enables uncompressed SMPTE ST 2110 I/O ...
12/06/2026
URSA Cine 12K LF Used to Create Visuals for STUTS' K-Arena Concert
Brie Clayton June 12, 2026
0 Comments
Organic visuals projected on a giant scre...
12/06/2026
MTI FILM Acquires Mango New Edit, Expanding its Global Post-Production Services ...
12/06/2026
AI Point Tracking Speeds Up Complex VFX Tracks in Mocha Pro
Jessie Electa Petrov June 12, 2026
0 Comments
The 2026.5 release adds automatic point trac...
12/06/2026
Bitmovin, a provider of video streaming solutions, has partnered with Simplestream, a provider of OTT and broadcast solutions, and technology provider Xperi, to...
12/06/2026
Leostream Corporation, creator of the world-leading Leostream Remote Desktop Access Platform, today announced Jigsaw24, a leading B2B IT solutions provider wit...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
12/06/2026
AgentPerf from Artificial Analysis, the industry's first agentic AI benchmark, gives developers, enterprises and infrastructure providers a clear way to com...
12/06/2026
Back to All News
Netflix Unveils First-Look Images from Villaflor, Santiago Mitre's New Film
Entertainment
12 June 2026
GlobalArgentina
Link copied to ...
12/06/2026
Back to All News
Cross the Boundaries of the Real World into the Spirit Realm i...
12/06/2026
A fentanyl countermeasure that adapts to combat future black-market drugs Scripps Research scientists developed a vaccine that teaches the immune system to rapi...
11/06/2026
The immense size of the tourney and its Atlantic-spanning operation also disting...
11/06/2026
Nielsen has released a new soccer fandom consumer research report, The Fans Behind The Game: FIFA World Cup 2026 Edition, examining the soccer audience in the...
11/06/2026
Telemundo will launch its FIFA World Cup 2026 coverage on Thursday, June 11 with...
11/06/2026
FuboTV Inc. has announced a distribution agreement with NBCUniversal. Fubo customers can now stream Telemundo and Universo, with NBC Sports Network (NBCSN), NBC...
11/06/2026
DAZN has announced its in-app features for FIFA World Cup 2026 coverage in Spain...
11/06/2026
Roblox has released the 2026 Roblox Digital Expression Report: Wave 4 - Sports D...
11/06/2026
FIFA has unveiled DNA, the Official FIFA World Cup 2026 Anthem, performed by A...
11/06/2026
ESPN will provide English- and Spanish-language news and information coverage of FIFA World Cup 2026 across its U.S. media platforms from June 11 through July 1...
11/06/2026
The latest product of the outstanding RIT Sports Network program, this recent grad from Long Island is carving out a promising path in broadcast engineering
In...
11/06/2026
DAZN has announced a multi-year agreement to make DSPORTS channels available to ...
NBA Returns: Turner Sports Teams With League, ESPN on Made-for-TV Season With REMI MLB effort at home, the broadcaster opts for onsite NBA production By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
