NBA Tip-Off: ESPN Goes 1080p HDR End-to-End, Flipping HDR Switch on REMI and REMCO Shows Iconic studio show Inside the NBA' will now air on ESPN or ABC By Mark J Burns, SVG Contributor
Wednesday, October 22, 2025 - 11:59 am
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ESPN's coverage of the NBA returns this week, starting tonight with back-to-back days of doubleheaders, with defending NBA champion Oklahoma City Thunder and Cooper Flagg, the Dallas Mavericks' 2025 No. 1 draft pick, among key storylines.
The 2025-26 season also marks the ESPN/ABC debut of Emmy Award-winning studio show Inside the NBA.
We are extremely excited about this coming season and especially our excellent slate of games right off the bat for opening week, says Alan McDonald, senior operations specialist, ESPN. The NBA has a short offseason, a long regular season, and a playoff season that can be a challenge in itself. However, our ops and tech teams are ready for the new challenges, especially the new HDR production model, that the new season brings.
New This Season: All Acquisition in 1080p HDR In terms of production, he notes a big change this season: all acquisitions in the truck are in 1080p HDR for both REMI and REMCO shows. ESPN will use the BBC LUT to convert to SDR for transmission to its Bristol, CT, facility for either integration on REMI shows or transmission through master control on REMCO shows.
This is a big step, and we look forward to a time when we can be full HDR from end to end, says McDonald, adding that the network has increased the number of REMCO games with production personnel onsite versus REMI games produced from Bristol. For the 2025-26 season, ESPN will do 50% of its games in the REMCO models. In addition, Phil Dean, new lead producer for NBA, succeeds Tim Corrigan, who shifted to a new role following the 2025 NBA Finals.
For the first time, ESPN's NBA operation will have all Game Creek mobile units this season, including those used in years past: Spirit, Nitro, and 79. In April, the broadcaster brought Game Creek Flagship to the Bristol campus to prepare it for the NBA Finals and will continue to share it with Monday Night Football for the upcoming campaign.
In addition, ESPN will deploy Game Creek's newest mobile units, Bird and Magic, on a regular rotation. These trucks were built for Amazon, notes McDonald. We are working closely with them and Game Creek to align our schedules for the most sensible rollouts.
Graphics: Accommodating HDR On the graphics front, ESPN has upgraded all its Gen 5 Viz units to handle HDR as part of our continued push for full HDR acquisition, he says.
ESPN will also continue to work closely with TGI on shot-distance-tracking graphics and virtual ads. The virtual-ad-insertion technology has gotten so good that we end up taking for granted how natural it looks, McDonald says, but it has taken quite a bit of research and adjustment to get to this point. We save AR/VR elements for marquee matchups, but you can expect to see those deployments this season as well.
The broadcaster is close to debuting new animated shot-chart graphics, which will be used consistently following their final approval.
For the regular season, ESPN will deploy the customary audio package: four announcer headsets, seven wired handheld microphones as booth and reporter backups, five RF coach and player mics, and a push-to-talk ref mic. Ambient microphones will include high-crowd, court, stanchion, and camera mics. In total, that means 30-plus microphones for NBA on ESPN broadcasts.
NBA's New Broadcast Partners With the league having new broadcast partners for 2025-26, ESPN has weekly meetings with NBA technical, the NBA, and Amazon to share notes, work through venue and team idiosyncrasies, and decipher plans for sharing mobile units and/or generators.
We've been working closely with the NBA's new broadcast partners since the start, McDonald says. Ultimately, this industry is a relatively small world, and, operationally, we are all moving in and out of the same spaces with many of the same crew members and mobile units.
For example, Amazon's new production truck, Game Creek Bird, will tip off ESPN's NBA coverage tonight at Madison Square Garden but will remain in New York for Amazon's first Knicks game on Friday.
We talked about how all that would work on our calls, says McDonald, and even discussed how we might share a UPS battery backup or a twin generator to support our shared endeavor.
ESPN is in talks with Warner Bros. Discovery about Inside the NBA, which will continue to be produced by TNT Sports.
When asked how often the Inside the NBA studio show will be on the road in 2025-26, McDonald says the network is in continued talks with Warner Bros. Discovery - which will continue to produce the show via TNT Sports at its Atlanta headquarters - about how it will be integrated into existing ESPN programming.
From our end, he says, we are finalizing comms design and transmission plans and testing new additions. This week, we are setting up locker-room-hallway player headsets so the studio crew can banter with players. A lot of what makes that show fun is the off-the-cuff back and forth. We are still learning how to support that, but we talk regularly with their production team and look forward to our first shows this week.
This season, ESPN's NBA A-game productions will have a similar camera complement, with up to 12 handheld and hard Sony HDC-5500, or similar, cameras. In addition, the broadcaster will deploy Fletcher Above The Rim cameras and new Atom One or Proton HDR-capable POVs for hallways or behind-the-glass shots for all REMCO games. For specialty games, such as tonight's opener between the Cleveland Cavaliers and New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, ESPN will add 4X supe
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NBA Tip-Off: ESPN Goes 1080p HDR End-to-End, Flipping HDR Switch on REMI and REMCO Shows Iconic studio show Inside the NBA' will now air on ESPN or ABC By Mark J Burns, SVG Contributor 
