Boosting Production: Inside IMG's Superfeed for the ITF Davis Cup 2023

Boosting production: Inside IMG's superfeed for the ITF Davis Cup 2023 By Heather McLean

Tuesday, October 10, 2023 - 09:42

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IMG recently produced the first ever superfeed for the International Tennis Federation (ITF) Davis Cup. It brought four venue feeds from the locations of the Davis Cup Bologna, Manchester, Split and Valencia into IMG Studios at Stockley Park to create the superfeed, where a continuity commentator, Sue Thearle, linked the action together.

Alongside the superfeed for the week-long tournament from 12 to 17 September, IMG produced daily venue recaps and match summaries, as well as scripted short format highlights shows and edited content to enhance the superfeed.

Brand new superfeed

The ITF reshaped the format of the Davis Cup with a deal struck in 2019 with investment group Kosmos, switching from a home and away format to using four countries to simultaneously host the event. Although the deal ended abruptly in January this year, the shape of the tournament has remained the same with Croatia, the UK, Italy and Spain hosting the 2023 edition.

Dominic Wright, executive producer for IMG at the Davis Cup, tells SVG Europe: The superfeed is a brand new thing for [the ITF]. It's something they've never done before. This year we had Croatia, Britain, Italy and Spain as the four hosts. Then four teams come, so there's 16 teams. The ITF provides a host broadcast from each of those four venues for the play, which is over six days.

[The ITF] decided that they wanted to get involved in providing something for the consumer that doesn't have a team in the tournament anymore, continues Wright. The ITF wanted to create a superfeed, which basically means [broadcasters can] pick the best match at [any] time [to play out]. If Novak's playing doubles, let's show people Novak. Had Britain been knocked out for example, it would've given the British audience something to watch.

He goes on: It was offered to all broadcasters. [The ITF] didn't have any takers when they decided to offer the content the superfeed hoping that people would get on board afterwards, which they did. It was a bit of a gamble on [the ITF's] part, but essentially it was a new undertaking as the tournament changed format.

Wright says the superfeed was a hit with broadcasters. He explains: It worked and it worked very well. Bearing in mind it's right off the back of the US Open, Novak still turned up for it and it was crewed really well with really experienced tennis people on all four venues and at Stockley Park. That's where you have to take your hat off to the team for making that happen.

All in the planning

The ITF created plan for the resources required for the superfeed, along with all the graphics, cosmetic elements, and non-live content inventory. Bren Hester, the ITF's broadcast consultant, was behind the planning and design for the Davis Cup superfeed project.

John Hoggan, IMG's head of engineering for the tournament, comments: Bren had a very clear idea of what he wanted to achieve and how he wanted to achieve it. I think with our technology, there was a few challenges based on what he defined [as required]. He said, we have to use this device with this sort of stuff, but our infrastructure is slightly different. However, we did achieve the end product, which is just about getting the right workflow for how we wanted to do that.

IMG set up different areas at its Stockley Park production centre in order to service the Davis Cup. These included a live logging area with that content, then distributed down to the guys in the gallery for them to then hop about, see where the important things are going on and offer those insights as the programme went along, says Hoggan.

Hoggan continues: We had the main production gallery in our new IP gallery that we'd only recently built a few years ago. It is interesting with IP with our technology, but we provided everything that [the ITF] wanted in there. That included comms to every venue as well. That, again, is always a challenge with comms. But once everything had been established and linked, then that was all great. We used Comrex as our technology for the comms, and brought it all into the system. Then we've had a new graphics company, TV Graphics [that the ITF bought in]. We've never worked with them before. It is always great to get in somebody else and see how they do their graphics technology.

On TV Graphics, Hoggan says: They're really good. Their technology was something different we had never used before; they do it a different way. Normally you've got the usual graphics engine, it's got all different outputs and everything's run-of-the-mill. But they'd done something quite unique and we had to integrate their system into ours. It was a little bit of challenge with that, but we put it together and it was fine.

Hoggan adds on TV Graphics: They were very bespoke of what they do. A lot of their graphics elements are just really built on a laptop, so it is getting the laptop to integrate into our TV system. They had a breakout Matrox box, but normally we would deal with a complete Viz Engine or a Chyron that's completely designed as off the shelf. We know how they work; we slot them in, plug them up, we know we're good to go. This was just a little bit different because we haven't seen it before.

Other rooms in operation for the Davis Cup at Stockley Park were replay and post production suites, so the guys were editing and clipping up from the live matches that were going on and also using stuff that we had off archive or that Bren brought in from archive, says Hoggan.

For the archive room, Hoggan comments, they were pushing all the material to the portals and stuff. They had the facility in there to mak

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