SVG Summit: Replay Review, High-Speed Cameras Changing the Face of Baseball

If you missed this year’s SVG Summit, Dec. 15-16 at the New York Hilton Hotel, SVG has assembled video highlights of every single Day 2 session, allowing you to see what you may have missed during the day’s keynote conversations and panels. Full videos of every session will be available on the SVG Members page in the coming days, but SVG will showcase the best moments in a series of stories this week.

America’s Pastime has come a long way in the past calendar year in terms of production technology integration and official instant replay review. At the ninth-annual SVG Summit, production powers from Major League Baseball and its various broadcast partners discussed the present and future of baseball on TV and how the new replay review system is changing things across the board for content producers and viewers alike.

On the replay side, Tom Psipsikas, Broadcast Infrastructure Engineer at MLB Advanced Media and Justin Klemm, Director of Replay at the MLB Office of The Commissioner outlined the system’s technological workflow, how the determined what style of system to use, and what’s to come in the future as replay review in baseball matures.

From the broadcasters’ perspective, Matthew Lipp, a director for MLB on TBS, Woody Freiman, VP of Production and Programming at YES Network, and Jon Slobotkin, Vice President/Executive Producer-Live Events at NBC Sports Regional Networks shared how replay review changed how they produced and directed a baseball game, how slow-mo is dramatically changing the on-air product, and how to strike a delicate balance between enhancing a telecast with technology and over doing it.

Tom Psipsikas outlines MLB Advanced Media’s replay infrastructure:

Justin Klemm, a former umpire himself, gives the league and umpire’s side of replay review:

Klemm expresses the value in getting various groups – including the umpires and players unions – to buy-in to the system and how the league went about choosing the “challenge” model:

Matthew Lipp describes how replay effects how he directs a baseball game for TV:

Klemm on what’s to come from replay:

Jon Slobotkin on how regional networks integrate technology while mitigating costs:

Woody Freiman says the YES Network is a little more conservative in its use of technology enhancements:

Lipp says the new 6X cameras are great additions to a baseball camera arsenal:

Slobotkin hopes for more high-speed cameras for replay: