Live From US Open 2022: Rightsholders' Needs, Team of Partners Drive USTA's Innovations New tech includes UHD on Arthur Ashe, 1080p on other show courts By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Tuesday, September 6, 2022 - 7:08 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlights
The 2022 US Open Tennis Championships at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, New York, have taken things to a new level. Record crowds are matched by record viewing audiences on ESPN, and the USTA is working to deliver in new ways for rightsholders and tennis fans around the globe. Over the past two years, the US Open production effort was reshaped by the pandemic, but this year's operation, masks aside, feels pretty much back to normal, and the team was able to embrace new technologies, including UHD on Arthur Ashe Stadium and 1080p on the remaining show courts.
USTA Managing Director, Broadcast Patti Fallick (and the USTA production team) have spent a large portion of their waking days in the USTA Broadcast Building, located across the road behind Arthur Ashe Stadium. And after two years of smaller representation by rightsholders due to COVID, both old and new rightsholders are onsite in force.
It has been great to have the broadcast building fully utilized with all of our broadcast partners onsite, she says. We also have a lot of new broadcast partners this year, like Nine in Australia, ECLAT/Spo-TV in Southeast Asia, Spark in New Zealand, and Sony in India. And everybody has sent crews, no matter where they are from in the world. Everybody was just happy to be back onsite, even before we knew about Serena Williams.
The big news this year is the leap to UHD and 1080p, both important moves to keep rightsholders around the world happy, especially because UHD deployment has become a reality in Europe, Japan, India, and China.
We were planning for 1080p and also for UHD for a while because, in a lot of instances, it's a contractual obligation with rightsholders, Fallick explains. COVID derailed those plans for a while, but we're happy to be able to offer 1080p to rightsholders. I think the improved quality of the feed is noticeable.
A Spidercam at Louis Armstrong court raises the production level and gives a new look to coverage.
Use of native UHD for matches in Arthur Ashe Stadium puts the USTA at the technology forefront. True native-UHD production is the exception in the U.S., even for content ultimately delivered to viewers in UHD.
We were considering UHD for Arthur Ashe and worked closely with our partners at ESPN, in their role as host for the US Open, to move in that direction, says Fallick. It was a challenge to figure out the workflow and kudos to the engineering team led by ESPN Senior Remote Operations Specialist Sam Olson and Senior Technical Specialist Steve Raymond, NEP Senior Project Manager Nick Romano, and Gravity Media Director, Special Projects, Hamish Harris and his team. Everybody worked together to figure out how we can do 1080p and native UHD.
Our goal, she continues, was to make sure that every entity that receives a video signal - whether that be SMT, Hawkeye, our in-house IPTV system, broadcasters, TOC, or other touchpoints - could get the signals in 1080p and would be able to receive it into their individual infrastructures. It took some doing to pull it off, and, candidly, I held my breath until we made the final switchover. But it worked out really well, thanks to the hard work and efforts by the ESPN host technical teams and all the communication and collaboration by the different vendors.
The move to UHD had a ripple effect on the USTA's world-feed graphics package as well as archiving and file distribution.
We hadn't updated our graphics package in a long time, notes Fallick. SMT designed a really modern look for our new UHD graphic package for the world feed. It's clean, bright, and modern and puts us one step ahead on that front, as we move towards more UHD coverage.
With respect to file distribution and archiving, she says the teams at Veritone and Thumbwar stepped up to the challenge in a big way: When we first started talking about UHD, our partners from Veritone, who handle that content, looked at me and said, That's going to be a lot of content.' But it turned out to be fortuitous because we now have Serena's last US Open run in UHD, including iso cams, and that is a win all around. But, yes, it is a lot more content for them to move into the cloud and archive.
A new addition to US Open coverage is the towel cam, a miniature camera mounted a few feet behind each towel bin at Arthur Ashe Stadium.
The USTA also pushed ESPN to create a new look with the addition of cameras behind the towel bins and the return of the Spidercam cabled aerial camera system to Louis Armstrong Stadium, the court located next to Arthur Ashe that hosts the second-most-important matches.
It elevates the look and feel of coverage, and, at home, it feels bigger, says Fallick. Kudos to Jamie and the team.
Williams's announcement that the US Open would be her final event set off a chain reaction of not only ticket requests but also how to honor one of the greatest tennis players of all time.
The fact that Serena announced that she wanted to do it here was special, says Fallick. We wanted to find a unique, special way to honor her and do a special tribute. Our Managing Director, Marketing, Nicole Kankam; Director, Marketing, Nicole Munroe; and Executive Producer, US Open Productions, Michael Fiur; and ESPN, VP, Production, Jamie Reynolds spent a lot of time brainstorming, along with our Tournament Director Stacey Allaster. How can we do this and find the right tone? What's the right video, and what's the right presentation?
It was special and electric, Fallick continues, espe
