Collaboration, Hybrid Workflows, and a Quiet Beer: How Sky Sports Covered the Premier League Finale on Sunday

Collaboration, Hybrid Workflows, and a Quiet Beer: How Sky Sports Covered the Premier League Finale on Sunday By Will Strauss, Contributing Editor

Monday, July 27, 2020 - 11:55 am

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A mixture of remote production, traditional OB, and a hybrid of both were utilized by Sky Sports for its coverage of the final round of Premier League matches which took place on Sunday, July 26. The pay-TV broadcaster showed eight of the ten games - which all kicked off at 4 pm UK time - live on its channels and acted as the host broadcaster for five of them with BBC Sport producing its coverage of three others.

On the final day of last season, Sky was the host broadcaster at just two games. And it didn't have COVID-19 to deal with. This year's finale is a big undertaking and one that has not been taken lightly.

With Liverpool having already won the title, the editorial focus for the day will be on Champions League qualification and the teams battling against relegation.

Leicester against Manchester United will be produced entirely remotely and there will be two hybrid games: Arsenal vs Watford and Everton vs Bournemouth. These will feature NEP trucks at the Emirates Stadium and Goodison Park respectively, replays done from NEP's base in Salford and the presentation directed from the gallery at Sky.

This is the first time we'll be doing eight games live simultaneously. All the matches will have augmented audio and graphics and everything you'd expect from our live set-up. It's a huge operation.

The Chelsea vs Wolves encounter will have replays on-site with the rest of the production done remotely. While Crystal Palace vs Spurs is the only game being produced in a purely traditional' way, with everything happening in the truck on site.

There will be between 40 and 50 crew on-site at each of the eight games, with a further 80 people working at Sky in Osterley, all socially distanced of course. 90 cameras will be deployed across the matches.

This mammoth logistical exercise has been just over three weeks in the planning but has benefitted from all the work that has been done since the Premier League re-started on 17 June, as Emma Bayliss, Sky's senior production manager for Premier League Football, explained, chatting to SVG Europe on the eve of the final weekend.

We've got used to the fast turnaround of matches over the last six weeks, she says. We'll have covered 64 matches in 40 days [by Sunday]. We got the nod on Wednesday night, confirming the games we would be showing. It's not unusual for [that information] to be this late so we've had plans in place without knowing the actual games.

This is the first time we'll be doing eight games live [simultaneously]. All the matches will have augmented audio and graphics and everything you'd expect from our live set-up. It's a huge operation.

COVID-19 has, of course, had an impact on these plans. Without the pandemic, the set-up might have been very different.

For the secondary games, yes [it would have been different], says senior football producer Billy McGinty. We've conquered remote production over the last six weeks. We've got some hugely talented people but the mileage we've done is important as well. We've got used to how we do it.

The combination of [people and experience], for [the last round of matches], is so valuable. In normal circumstances, no we wouldn't have a gallery directed at Sky, a match cut in a truck outside the Emirates and replays in Salford. We'd just have a truck.

The Leicester game will be the hub of the programming output, with presenter David Jones (pictured below, hosting Monday Night Football) anchoring from Osterley accompanied by pundits Roy Keane and Micah Richards. The build-up to the live matches will be extensive, adds McGinty.

The two stories in our build-up hour are the top four and relegation. Clearly, we're in good shape because [with our live matches] we've got the top four covered, and two of the three relegation games. We'll have 45 minutes on the top four, including down-the-lines from Chelsea and Leicester, all hubbed from Sky Studios. And then part two will be focussed on relegation, with down-the-lines from Arsenal and Everton.

The challenge is to break away from what we've been doing for the past couple of weeks and put some old ways of working back into the system safely.

While elements of the live match coverage will be done remotely, nearly all of the VTs for the build-up programming have been done that way too, as has been the case since the beginning of lockdown.

The team of assistant producers (APs) who have created all the montages, with the help of Sky Production Services editing team, have cut pieces, interviews and montages from their studies, bedrooms, front rooms, explains McGinty.

[They] have all found new ways of working and anyone watching throughout the re-start they wouldn't have noticed the difference between what has been packaged at Sky in years gone by and what has been packaged on a laptop at home. Credit must go to other parts of Sky.

To make this possible, editing, MAM and archive system access has been made available remotely through virtualisation.

Technically, very early in the lockdown, we started virtualising lots of the edit throughout the whole business, interjects Sky Sports technical manager Gordon Roxburgh.

We have really pushed on with that. The number of editors that can now work virtually, plugging into platforms at home, is immense.

Interestingly, the football production team have the Academy Awards to thank, in part, for this being possible, as Roxburgh continues.

We started this journey in February for the Oscars. We had an editor who couldn't get to London so we built a sy

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