MLS All-Star 2023: MLS, Apple Recognize League's Best With Heightened Production Value at Audi Field

MLS All-Star 2023: MLS, Apple Recognize League's Best With Heightened Production Value at Audi Field Streamer's inaugural season hits the halfway mark in Washington, D.C. By Kristian Hern ndez, Senior Editor

Wednesday, July 19, 2023 - 2:28 pm

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The 2023 Major League Soccer All-Star Game (8 p.m. ET on MLS Season Pass) heads to the nation's capital to pit the league's best athletes against one of the best sides in the English Premier League, Arsenal. Hosted at Audi Field in Washington, D.C., this midseason celebration will also be the first under the production of Apple. From MLS's perspective, the five-month-old partnership has birthed the implementation of fresh technologies, including a Spidercam, a RF Steadicam, wearable cameras, and the reliance of a connected-production ecosystem.

Liam McHugh, Bradley Wright-Phillips, MLS Commissioner Don Garber, Sacha Kljestan, and Kaylyn Kyle during halftime of the 2023 MLS All-Star Game.

Apple has been a terrific partner throughout our production planning process - all season long, not just during the leadup to the All-Star Game, says Seth Bacon, EVP, media, MLS. We have great collaboration between our production, operations, and engineering teams to ensure that all aspects of our plan are accounted for and ready to deliver our events to a global audience at a high quality.

Tech Highlights: 20 Cameras, Including SkyCam, Cover Audi Field For Tuesday night's MLS Skills Challenge, the production team needed to capture six different events: Shooting, Touch, Cross & Volley, Passing, Crossbar, and Goalie Wars. With the frenetic pace of each event, Apple and MLS covered the entire playing field at multiple angles. To accomplish this, a total of 16 cameras were placed on and above the playing surface. The most notable being an aerial Spidercam, a Steadicam at pitch level, and multiple super slow-motion cameras. For Wednesday night's exhibition, the camera compliment will reach 20 cameras with the addition of POVs and a wearable referee camera sponsored by A&T and powered by Mindfly. This same device was worn by players during Tuesday's Skills Challenge.

On the audio side, the Skills Challenge allowed the league to get creative with how fans understand a player's point of view. This required the use of IFB communication between the booth and the participating player. For instance, during the Cross & Volley Challenge, D.C. United Goalkeeper Tyler Miller was interviewed by Jake Zivin, Kaylyn Kyle, and Taylor Twellman throughout his turn in the competition:

Nothing easy about stopping shots from Flo Balogun, especially when you're mic'd up.

Well done, Tyler Miller.#MLSAllStar Cross & Volley Challenge pres. by @ATT 5G pic.twitter.com/a46BdgGOzZ

- Major League Soccer (@MLS) July 19, 2023

Jillian Sakovits joined the trio from the sidelines. Tony Cherchi, Jorge Perez-Navarro, Marcelo Balboa, and Rodolfo Landeros were on the call in Spanish with and Frederic Lord and Vincent Destouches were on the call in French.

On the operations side, the onsite crew is working with 300 credentialed personnel. In the compound, both productions are being done with mobile units from NEP Group. Opting for a model that services coverage in multiple languages, two of the mobile-unit providers' main trucks are on hand in Washington, D.C. NEP's Supershooter 9 is handling English-language for both nights as Spanish-language is being done from NEP's Supershooter 5.

To distribute the game domestically and globally, NEP is supplying seven separate onsite feeds with up to 16 channels of audio to the Apple Live Operations Center (ALOC) at the NEP Production Center in Los Angeles. Some feeds will also need to be sent to NEP's VISTA Worldlink centralized-production facility in South Florida. In addition to English-language and Spanish-langue coverage, the MLS All-Star Game will be presented in French as well. This production wrinkle requires a tight-rope, balancing act.

A Spidercam (right) and Steadicam (left) captured Goalie Wars on Tueday night.

One of the unique aspects of producing live matches for MLS Season Pass is the number of feeds we need to create for each match to service our various stakeholders and distribution regions, adds Bacon. With each requiring a sponsored and unsponsored version depending on where the feed is distributed, this requires a significant amount of coordination between the production truck on site, our data center in Dallas, and Apple's master control center in Los Angeles.

A Gradual Lead Up: First Half of Productions Leads to Midseason Exhibition Prior to the All-Star break, MLS and Apple were refining their production philosophy heading into their inaugural season together. Supplying a platform for everyone to take in the U.S.'s top flight, it was critical to not only create a plan for appealing live broadcasts but also team-curated and non-live content to keep supporters engaged with MLS Season Pass.

A look inside NEP's Supershooter 9 at Audi Field.

Right off the bat, the pairing enjoyed a handful of storylines on Matchday 1, including St. Louis City SC playing their first-ever match against Austin FC on Saturday, Feb. 25. The club would eventually play for the first time in front of their home supporters at CityPark against Charlotte FC on Saturday, March 4. As the season progressed, the partnership saw other notable highlights: another edition of El Tr fico between LA Galaxy and LAFC was played at the iconic Rose Bowl on July 4, FC Cincinnati is in first place in the Eastern Conference after finishing in last place in three of their first four seasons in MLS, and St. Louis City SC currently sit at the top of the Western Conference. Overall, the introduction of this new streaming deal along with flourishing pl

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