Right on Cue: IMG Delivers Live World Snooker Championship Action for BBC, Eurosport

Right on cue: IMG delivers live World Snooker Championship action for BBC and Eurosport Split production sees onsite match coverage with remote presentation By Fergal Ringrose, SVG Europe

Monday, August 10, 2020 - 15:22

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View of the auditorium at The Crucible with both snooker tables for the Snooker World Championship

Detached from its time-honoured April to May place in the international sporting calendar by the coronavirus crisis, the World Snooker Championship 2020 has resurfaced on our screens thanks to the combined efforts of World Snooker, UK government and local authorities and host broadcast provider IMG Productions Scotland, along with broadcast partners BBC Sport and Eurosport.

IMG provides the presentation output for the BBC as well as the world feed match coverage, whilst Eurosport manages its own network presentation.

The World Championship from The Crucible in Sheffield is currently on BBC TV, iPlayer, Red Button, the BBC Sport website and the BBC Sport app. Over the 17 days of the tournament the marathon coverage appears across its various platforms 24/7 with live match play from mid morning until late at night.

Eurosport is screening every round of the Championship, including qualifying, on its main channels across more than 50 markets in Europe from 21 July to 16 August alongside the Eurosport app and on-demand highlights from every match.

Last year, Judd Trump beat John Higgins by 18 frames to 9 at the Crucible to claim his maiden World Championship title, becoming one of just 11 players to complete snooker's Triple Crown. This year the semi-finals commence on Wednesday 12 August with the final concluding on Sunday 16 August. This year's winner will receive £500,000, with the total prize fund being more than £2 million.

Live action at one of the two tables at The Crucible in Sheffield

The Championship was one of the first sporting events chosen to allow for the return of spectators since lockdown restrictions were lifted in England. As a result a maximum of 250 spectators were permitted when the main Championship started on the morning of Friday 31 July with defending champion Judd Trump breaking off against Tom Ford. The normal capacity at The Crucible is 980.

Around 200 spectators were inside the arena on Day One when Prime Minister Boris Johnson made an announcement that due to a new tightening of COVID-19 measures in some parts of northern England and a rise in the number of confirmed positive cases, crowds would no longer be permitted at any sporting events for at least the next fortnight. Consequently from Day Two no crowds would be permitted.

This required World Snooker and host broadcaster IMG Productions Scotland to pivot once more, having spent months of planning alongside authorities and technical partners to prepare for a World Championship tournament where the principal guiding objective was to have as few people as possible on location in Sheffield.

IMG Productions Scotland executive producer, Alison Witkover, told SVG Europe: We found out in May that the Championship was hopefully going to happen at the end of July and from that point, we started investigating possibilities for remote production. WST, the governing body, were keen to have an absolute minimum number of people on-site in order to get the go-ahead to safely run the event.

So we had a lot of conversations and initially started thinking whether we could do everything remotely from our studios in Stockley Park [beside Heathrow Airport] including the match coverage. However, because of the timescales and costs involved to bring back all the individual camera feeds, we opted to keep the match coverage up in Sheffield and produce the studio presentation at Stockley Park.

The match camera operators needed to be on location anyway, and the production team required to provide the world feed is actually relatively small, so we felt this was the best solution. It took a lot of preparatory work by a number of people including our OB provider NEP, IMG Studios and the BBC.

Since then it's been evolving really, said Witkover. We've produced the snooker from Sheffield for over 20 years, so we had to unpick it and work out how we could still offer high-quality output in a very different way. To put the change in context: last year we had 145 people onsite and this year it's 59 (on shift patterns to cover the length of day).

We have a reporter in Sheffield, along with an ENG camera team producing feature content, so secured some additional connectivity to bring these feeds back to IMG.

Most commentary is being done from IMG Studios in London, but there is one commentary box onsite. This was required as a number of the snooker commentary/analysis team are also competing as players in the World Championship and mix the two activities through each day while they remain active in the tournament.

One of the most complicated things has been the audio. We have commentary in London and commentary in Sheffield and there are nearly 30 different audio feeds passing between the Crucible and IMG Studios. The telestrator was a challenge too, but we came up with a solution to control the hardware (based in Sheffield) from Stockley Park, allowing the commentators to control the telestrator output.

And then we had to create a studio in London, as we are usually located in the public Winter Gardens in Sheffield. We have used elements of the BBC Sport OB set and added a snooker table in the studio so that our pundits can do demos and analysis. A plasma screen links the studio with the Crucible enabling us to talk to players and the reporter.

Every position at IMG Studios is divided by a Perspex screen and a strict wipe-out wipe-in system is in place

We are very strict on social distancing here at IMG, continued Witkover. Every position is divided by a Persp

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