New Venues, New Tech: How FOX Sports, ESPN Are Reinventing Their UFL Broadcasts for Year 3

With new teams and new venues to adapt to, the spring-football league's partners continue to innovate and enhance their productions

The UFL has always served as an ideal environment for its media partners, ESPN and FOX Sports, to experiment with new production technology. That will continue during the spring-football league's third season, which kicks off tonight in Louisville, but the league itself will have a very different look.

In addition to launching three new teams and eliminating the two-conference format, the league has shifted away from large NFL and college football stadiums toward smaller, more intimate MLS soccer venues - a strategic move to bring fans closer to the action and create a tighter game-day atmosphere.

Because the soccer-centric stadiums hosting UFL games this year were not necessarily designed for football production, extensive broadcast infrastructure - including new JBT boxes and thousands of strands of fiber cabling - had to be installed at five of the eight UFL home stadiums (the league's other three teams/venues did not require significant changes).

We're not walking into venues that have camera positions you would typically use for football, notes Brad Cheney, VP, field operations and engineering, FOX Sports. Once these new venues were selected, our team led by [FOX Sports Head of UFL Operations] Lindsay Waine worked with the league and our partners at ESPN to go through every single venue and figure out where fiber was needed, where we were going to put the cameras, and how these shows were going to work. A whole lot of off-season work has been done to get to this point.

As in past years, remote production will play a major role in UFL broadcasts, with ESPN's REMI model and FOX's HRP (Home Run Production) model used for all 10 weeks of the regular season. Both FOX and ESPN will transition into full onsite productions for the semifinal games (June 7 on ABC and FOX) and Championship Game (June 13 on ABC). Although the respective production models will be largely the same, the shift in venues adds a significant new wrinkle for both broadcasters.

We are very fortunate to add some great venues to UFL this season, says Eric Kimmel, supervisor, REMI operations, ESPN. We were alerted to the new venues well in advance of the season. These MLS venues were not necessarily designed for football, and the UFL requires extensively more fiber than the stadiums currently had installed. So ESPN and our broadcast partners at FOX worked with the league on supplementing the cabling infrastructure.

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LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/03/27/new-venues-new-tech-how-fox-spo...
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