NFL Kickoff 2024: NBC Sports Starts the Party with Thursday Night Opener; Adds Peacock-Exclusive Friday Night Game From Brazil

NFL Kickoff 2024: NBC Sports Starts the Party with Thursday Night Opener; Adds Peacock-Exclusive Friday Night Game From Brazil Crew bolsters super slow-mo tally; takes advantages of greater on-field access By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital

Thursday, September 5, 2024 - 3:06 pm

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The NFL is back and the action begins in earnest tonight in Kansas City as the defending Super Bowl Champion Chiefs host the Baltimore Ravens (8:20 p.m. ET, NBC, Peacock).

For two decades, it has become a tradition for the NFL to kick off its season on a Thursday night at the home of the reigning champ. It's also become a bit of a tradition for NBC Sports to do so at Arrowhead Stadium. This is the second consecutive year and the third time in the past five years that Kansas City has hosted the NFL's season-opening celebration.

Tonight's opener is also just the first in a stretch of three games in four nights for the NBC Sports team with a new International Game in Brazil between the Green Bay Packers and Philadelphia Eagles being played on Friday night (that game will stream exclusively on Peacock) before the official Sunday Night Football opener brings the Los Angeles Rams to Detroit for a playoff rematch with the Lions.

More High-Frame Rate Cameras; Added Audio Access It's a hot start for the team at the helm of primetime television's #1 show for the past 13 consecutive years but for SNF coordinating producer Rob Hyland this is a job that his team has been preparing for all year.

We dissect and break down every single element of the production, says Hyland, who is entering his third season in the lead chair. We truly do. We challenge every element and how we've done it. I watch tape of other broadcasts.

These days nearly every NFL game is treated with an A game complement of production tools. Elements like SkyCams, PylonCams, and augmented reality graphics with AWS Next-Gen Stats are seemingly a part of every single broadcast. Hyland admittied that the more you watch, the more you see that everyone is basically doing the same show.

So how does NBC and Sunday Night Football continue to differentiate itself and retain its position as the elite NFL broadcast of the weekend? For this season, Hyland says that his crew is pushing for more audio access in the way of landing in-game interviews with and placing microphones on more players and coaches.

On the imaging front, he said in a media call last month that every camera on the show a high-frame-rate camera. That includes all standard game cameras including slashes, high end-zones, pylons, etc. with the only exception being the announce booth camera and the All-22.

Given the fact that I can use my iPhone to record broadcast-quality super slow-motion footage of my daughter's gymnastics practices, I challenged our crew to make every camera on our show a high-frame-rate camera, says Hyland. We converted seven more cameras to be high-frame-rate super slow-motion cameras. There's no excuse not to have every frame available. There are calls that come down to the centimeter sometimes, and I just really wanted to challenge our group to make sure that we had the best possible video available for our viewers to experience Sunday Night Football. That might look and feel a little different to a sophisticated eye.

NBC and Sunday Night Football will also benefit from a couple of new wrinkles being allowed by the NFL this season. NBC is going to be allowed to speak to a home team player in full uniform either at the end of warm-ups or just after run-outs and all head coaches are required to conduct an in-game interview with a sideline reporter. Also, all network partners for the first time will have locker room access after the field clears with a cap of 20 seconds of video per team allowed in the live broadcast.

Friday Night Game in Brazil Adds Operational Challenges The major new wrinkle to this opening weekend for NBC Sports is the addition of a Friday night game between the Packers and Eagles on Friday night. A different production crew both behind-the-scenes and on-air are on-site in Sao Paolo to produce that game which will be streamed exclusively on NBC's streaming platform, Peacock.

NBC Sports turned to EMG/Gravity Media to design a flypack to help handle the unique operations and engineering loads of broadcasting this game from Corinthians Arena.

The live production solution from EMG / Gravity Media is a specially designed baseband fly-away system for rapid deployment, that delivers 1080p HDR visuals with immersive Dolby 5.1 audio. Key components of the setup include a high-capacity, modular Grass Valley Sirius 850 routing system, an EVS Cerebrum centralized interface for broadcast control and monitoring of custom workflows, and a Calrec ImPulse core with extensive audio processing power to handle complex mixing and routing tasks. Grass Valley's K-Frame XP mainframe delivers advanced processing capabilities, powering a 4ME Kahuna panel for seamless integration of switching and effects.

We look forward to working on this landmark game with our longstanding partners EMG and Gravity Media, whose expertise and reliability will help us deliver a best-in-class presentation, says Craig Bernstein, VP Remote Technical Operations, NBC Sports.

MORE: NBC Sports Selects EMG/Gravity Media for NFL's First Game from Brazil

Last year, NBC and the NFL made headlines by distributing a Playoff game (between the Miami Dolphins and the Chiefs) behind Peacock. It was the first time a postseason game was not broadcast on television. As a part of that stream, NBC Sports presented 40% fewer commercials than it normally would on broadcast television. Additionally, NBC Sports presented a regular season game between the Buffalo Bills and Los Angeles Chargers without c

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