UK broadcaster Sky News tells TVBEurope about its election night coverage, which will include augmented reality, BATCAM, LED screens and more
By Jenny Priestley
Published: July 2, 2024 Updated: July 3, 2024
UK broadcaster Sky News tells TVBEurope about its election night coverage, which will include augmented reality, BATCAM, LED screens and more
target=_blank title=Share on LinkedIn class=share-linkedin> UK broadcaster Sky News tells TVBEurope about its election night coverage, which will include augmented reality, BATCAM, LED screens and more
https://www.tvbeurope.com/live-production/24-hour-party-people-the-technology-behind-sky-news-election-night-live title=Share via Email class=share-email>
UK broadcasters always knew the country was likely to go to the polls in 2024, it was just a matter of when. Rumours circulated on social media and in Westminster as to a possible date, but almost everyone was surprised when Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced on 22nd May that voters would go to the polls on 4th July.
Sky News immediately announced its plans for election night and the following morning. Kay Burley will anchor Election Night Live, the overnight results programme, from a 360-degree immersive studio normally used by Sky Sports' Monday Night Football.
The broadcaster has spent months working on its plans for the vote, explains Nick Phipps, editor of Election Night Live. One of the things we've learned from elections is that you don't necessarily know when they're coming, especially after what happened in 2017 when Theresa May surprised the country, he says.
We've had an ongoing election project that has been bubbling away in the background, and we maybe meet once every six weeks. We ramped it up this year because we knew there had to be an election by the end of 2024 or the beginning of 2025.
Sky News had plans in place for multiple eventualities. The team initially planned for a vote on 2nd May as well as later in the year. We were already building towards what we were going to deliver for the autumn when the announcement came, explains Phipps. It was a coincidence that the team was doing a photo shoot with all of the presenters on 22nd May. Beth Rigby and Sam Coates were getting messages and saying they needed to get to Westminster.
Election Night Live presenting team The broadcaster was always going to use the MNF studio even if the election took place during the football season. Most elections take place on a Tuesday or Thursday so it was unlikely to impact Sky Sports' schedule. That studio is brilliant, as you've seen from the way Sky Sports have used it over the last year, states Ben Fisher, head of studio output at Sky News, and director of Election Night Live.
With the tech they've got, the storytelling environments and various screens, it is a perfect space for an election in our view. I worked very closely with Ben Wickham, who is the creative director for Sky Sports, and we've collaborated pretty much from the get-go.
Connecting the studio to the gallery However, there was one big challenge. Sky Sports' galleries are in use almost continuously for remote productions, which means Sky News will be using its own galleries for Election Night Live. We do a lot of work remotely anyway with a lot of long cable runs and a lot of stuff happening over IP, adds Fisher.
This is not too much of a physical rejig really, it's a lot of clever people in the engineering departments and the graphics and data departments and technical supervisors who have figured out various patching and over patching to allow the cameras, the camera chains, the racking, the screen control. We've built an entire graphics area in the newsroom, which will control all of the screens. This has been a really impressive piece of work. It's working really well, and it does mean going forward if we ever want to use the studio again, it is now connected to our gallery.
The workflow will employ differing levels of automation, which Sky News uses more than its sport counterparts. If the election had been in October or November, we may have been able to automate a little bit more. But we're going to use it to drive the screens and the augmented reality, explains Fisher. The studio elements are going to be manual, but the rest of the programme, full frame graphics, all of the straps, the vidiprinter', the furniture, tapes, everything is all going to be through automation. It's quite exciting because we've never done that before in an election.
This will be our first election without a vision mixer, for example, he continues. Before, we'd always have the director, the vision mixer, the DA. Now we're going to have a team of directors essentially. We'll have me as the event director, an OverDrive director running the automation, and a studio director who will be in charge of the cameras and the screens.
In terms of cameras, the broadcast will use a jib, Steadicam and BATCAM, a smaller version of Spidercam, operated by two pilots sitting in a room overlooking the studio, one working the wires, the other pan/tilt. We're hoping for a Steadicam for Ed Conway, adds Fisher. We'll have four pedestal cameras, and everything is manually operated for the election night show.
Covering the counts Cameras will also be out and about across the country capturing the major events of the night. Most of the production in a way happens outside of the building because of the number of cameras that we have out and about, states Phipps. We're going to have stringers at every count in the country. We'll have cameras in about 90 locations, which actually means more constituencies because lots of places count more than one seat. Those will all need to have producers at them and/or correspondent
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
07/10/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, today announced the latest Long-Term Supported (LTS) release of Dalet Flex. Build...
06/09/2026
June 9 2026, 23:00 (PDT) Dolby and MagentaTV Bring Fans Closer to the FIFA Worl...
20/08/2026
Multiview available via SaaS for streaming platforms and operators through broadpeak.io, with live demonstrations at IBC2026
Broadpeak , a leader in streaming ...
20/08/2026
Techex, a leading provider of live broadcast infrastructure solutions, has appointed Stuart Almond as Chief Revenue Officer, further strengthening its executive...
20/08/2026
Avid today announced that MediaCity Studios has upgraded its production infrastructure with an enhanced end-to-end Avid production ecosystem, including the dep...
20/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
20/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
20/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
20/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
20/08/2026
IPC Expands Brazilian Presence with New Channel Partner CCATech
Industry veterans Carlos Abrah o and Bruno Lopes strengthen local support and expand IPCs prese...
20/08/2026
Zixi Enters Mauritius Market Through Strategic Deployment with MTC Jockey Club
Worlds Oldest Horse Racing Club in the Southern Hemisphere Selects Zixis Softwar...
20/08/2026
LA JOLLA, CA-Scripps Research assistant professor Tiantian Liu has received a five-year NIAID DP2 award from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Di...
20/08/2026
Audiences reveal appetite for multicultural Australia on-screen 20 August 2026
Dr Georgie McClean, Dr Rebecca Huntley (L-R)
By Dr Georgie McClean and Dr Rebec...
20/08/2026
How Mavis Studio Is Expanding Live Production Teaching at Sussex
Brie Clayton August 19, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image displays a student about to mix be...
20/08/2026
Vertical Unscripted Series Legal Queens Captured with Blackmagic Design
Brie Clayton August 19, 2026
0 Comments
Reality TV veteran Eric Gardner create...
20/08/2026
It's a new way into the cloud.
GeForce NOW welcomes Firefox support to the cloud, opening up another way to jump into high-performance PC gaming straight ...
19/08/2026
As the cost of IP nears price parity with traditional SDI, Reynolds argues that ...
19/08/2026
A private 5G bubble was chosen instead of traditional broadcast RF for the race ...
19/08/2026
(L-R) Rafael Manuel and Isabel Sicat attend the Filipi ana premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival at The Ray Theatre on January 23, 2026, in Park Cit...
19/08/2026
Studio owners invited to have their say on rates cuts
The Music Producers Guild (MPG) are inviting UK-based studios to take part in an in-depth survey that ...
19/08/2026
Vintage-inspired desktop interface revealed
Harrison's latest hardware offering sees them head into the world of audio interfaces, delivering a 10-in/12...
19/08/2026
Granular effect remains locked to scale and tempo
Described as your dream granular effect , Minimal Audio's latest creation is capable of turning any s...
19/08/2026
First polyphonic SWAM instrument incoming
Audio Modeling's latest physical-modelling orchestral instrument is just around the corner, and is now availab...
19/08/2026
World Cup Games Generate 84 Billion Minutes Across FOX, Fox Sports 1 and NBCU...
19/08/2026
July brought typical peak-holiday drops in viewership, driven primarily by viewers stepping away from screens and a visible decline in reach across both traditi...
19/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
19/08/2026
Henry joins BCE as the company accelerates its commercial strategy and expands its international presence across the media, broadcast and technology markets. He...
19/08/2026
iWedia, a leading provider of software solutions for connected TV devices, today announced a major milestone in Android platform optimization with the successfu...
19/08/2026
NTP Technology announces that ST 2110-30 audio-over-IP connectivity with AES67 and RAVENNA capabilities is now available for the brand's world-class audio i...
19/08/2026
Net Insight has been selected to provide its Nimbra platform by the service provider Big Blue Marble, formerly ORS Group, as the core media transport solution f...
19/08/2026
LiveU has supported Coventry City FC and several other top-flight UK football clubs through one of their most demanding live production challenges of the year, ...
19/08/2026
Nature Seekers Documentary Shot with Blackmagic URSA Cine 12K LF
Brie Clayton August 18, 2026
0 Comments
Filming endangered turtles required camera...
19/08/2026
Neyrinck Brings D-Control Consoles Back to Life on Apple Silicon with D-Control ...
19/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
19/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
19/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
19/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
19/08/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
19/08/2026
Riedel Communications today announced that Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Perth, Australia, implemented a comprehensive communications infrastructure that brin...
19/08/2026
QuickLink, a leading provider of award-winning video production and remote guest contribution solutions, will spotlight a major leap forward in remote guest con...
19/08/2026
Integrated platform melds media asset management, playout automation and newsroom workflows
EMAM, PlayBox Neo and SNEWS have officially launched Nuvex, a conne...
19/08/2026
Screen Australia releases the Private Investment Toolkit to strengthen screen in...
19/08/2026
Do Aussies truly value local content? Unpacking Screen Currency 2026 with Deirdr...
19/08/2026
There's an early Christmas gift for Bookish fans, as UKTV confirms the re-commission of the hit U&alibi drama, created by and starring Mark Gatiss. Viewers ...
19/08/2026
Wednesday 19 August 2026
Sky gives sports fans the chance to watch multiple liv...
19/08/2026
On Saturday September 5 Katie Taylor will step into the ring for the fight of her life against Flora Pili in front of 80,000 fans in Croke Park. A legendary fig...
18/08/2026
SportStream 2026, a free three-day virtual event, will take place September 15-17. One registration provides access to all three days of live programming and on...
18/08/2026
BeckTV will introduce BeckFlow to the European market at IBC2026, demonstrated on the Providius stand (10.F53).
BeckFlow is a web-based schematic documentation...
UK broadcaster Sky News tells TVBEurope about its election night coverage, which will include augmented reality, BATCAM, LED screens and more
