Overtime, Prime Video Marry Live Broadcast With Social-Media Flavor For Live-Streamed Coverage of Overtime Elite Basketball OTE semifinals stream on Prime Video on Friday night; final will stream March 3-4 By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital
Thursday, February 23, 2023 - 2:42 pm
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As a live-sports producer, what would you do if you had no limitations?
Access has been the industry's mantra for some time in this and, through the years, has taken on different meanings. Where can we get a camera? What behind-the-scenes team activity will a franchise or league allow us to film?
YouTube AMP personality and gamer Agent 00 (left) interviews OTE's Cold Hearts forward Tyler Smith using a small microphone and a POV camera affixed to his glasses. (All photos: Overtime Elite/Adam Hagy)
Lately, in the live-game environment, access has been less about the visuals and more about the sound. Where can we get a league to allow us to place a microphone? How can we persuade the league to allow us to air raw audio live for the audience? Can we talk to a player while he or she is competing?
We've seen the line move dramatically on this topic over the past year. Look at ESPN's and Fox Sports live interviews of players during MLB games or the PGA TOUR's use of ear buds to allow viewers to listen to caddie/golfer conversations and the commentators to freely speak with the golfer. And, of course, the inside access to replay review that broadcasts of the USFL and, most recently, the XFL have offered.
These developments aren't enabled by technological advances (although there have been some). They have been made possible through the trust and relationships built between broadcast partners and the leagues, teams, and players they cover. At the end of the day, a major professional sports league is going to let a broadcaster go only so far. An old-school college-football head coach is not going to allow live cameras in the locker room when the team is down by 24 at the half. Leagues won't allow salty arguments between players and officials to be aired unchecked.
Overtime Elite camera operators Forest Roy (left) and Esly Hernandez work the court during a live game coverage. RF camera operators are regularly allowed to make their way onto the court during and between plays.
To go back to the original question, what if that relationship was invisible and you could do whatever you wanted? Next-gen sports brand Overtime is answering that question with live broadcasts of its high-energy youth basketball league Overtime Elite.
In a custom-built facility -resembling a basketball soundstage more than an arena - in Atlanta, OTE is taking advantage of the free range of a playing surface to put cameras in unique locations and place microphones literally anywhere to capture every intimate detail and exchange during a game.
What's so amazing is that we can be so fan-first, says Marc Kohn, chief content officer, Overtime. When we think about our broadcast, at its simplest terms, we put ourselves in the fan's point of view. What do I want to see that I currently can't get from a [major broadcaster]? Their broadcasts are immaculate. You watch an NFL game; these broadcasts are stunning. We can't have 100 cameras on the game. We can't out-ESPN ESPN. We can't out-Fox Fox. We have to get creative and innovate on what we can do that they can't do.
Overtime Elite (OTE) is a six-team basketball league featuring some of the country's top 16- to 20-year-old players. The players are paid, receive training, and are showcased in a season-long format to prepare them for a college and/or professional career. It's a unique environment whose core is shortform, social-content creation.
This year, however, has brought a new opportunity for the organization to bring full game broadcasts to Amazon Prime Video. Games produced and delivered to Prime Video via a direct fiber line are exposing the social-first, shortform-video sports property to a new set of sports viewers and is establishing its own flavor of live game broadcast: any player's, coach's, or official's conversation can be aired live; game commentators are popular YouTube personalities; and cameras can zip all around the arena. For Overtime brass, it's a utopian dream of the best of traditional broadcast blended with the best in trending social video.
Engineer Scott Wynn (left) works in Overtime's control room in its Atlanta facility, where the live-streamed games are produced and shipped to Prime Video via fiber.
What we've done really well, I think, is mix the high-end television-production cameras with our social and visual voice, says Kohn. If you see our graphics package, it looks young. It looks like it's built for the TikTok generation and the Instagram generation. The difference is, you'll see a lot of television producers produce for a younger audience. We generally have people in their 20s that are doing all the design work going into these graphics. When we produce a 30-second package, sometimes, we'll use vertical video that'll look exactly like what would be seen on TikTok or Instagram. We're building it natively for TikTok and then using those assets inside the broadcast.
Live games are produced by Overtime from a centralized control room in its Atlanta facility and are overseen by Kohn, as well as Overtime Head of Production and Technology Matt Montemayor, Executive Producer Matt Fogarty, and Engineer Scott Wynn Bernard Worrell is executive producer of live games; K.J. Hammond is game producer; Garrett Hall, director and TD.
https://twitter.com/OvertimeElite/status/1624226785897459713
Games feature several segments and technologies that produce a unique basketball-viewing experience. A roving RF
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Overtime, Prime Video Marry Live Broadcast With Social-Media Flavor For Live-Streamed Coverage of Overtime Elite Basketball OTE semifinals stream on Prime Video on Friday night; final will stream March 3-4 By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital 
