Live From the US Open: USTA Makes Leap to HDR; Rights Holders Expand Presence Across Grounds

The US Open Tennis Championships are now in their final week of action and with respect to the USTA’s broadcast operations the big news is the move to 1080p for all the courts as well as HDR on the five show courts. And, as has been the case every year, the rights holders and the USTA work closely to continue to expand their presence at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, Queens.

Rights holders have the ability to shoot talent from this studio location in Arthur Ashe while matches are being played on the court.

“We’ve definitely seen an increased on-site presence with some partners, which is great,” says Dayna Navatta, USTA, Director, Broadcast Operations. “Telefonica [from Spain] and SKY Sports have increased their on-site production with full commentary teams and Italy’s SuperTennis retained their stage in Ashe. We encourage all our rights holders to come and do more on site and it’s exciting when their full production teams are here to take advantage of all the angles and opportunities we offer them.”

One new angle, literally, involves a second broadcast platform that has been constructed at the top of Arthur Ashe stadium and overlooks the entire stadium.

“For us it’s really looking at what our partners are asking for and how we can improve their experience and coverage onsite,” says Navatta. “So, we created a second platform up in Ashe Stadium that is almost at roof level but gives a unique bird’s eye view of the court behind the talent.”

Navatta says the location is extra popular because rights holders can film from it even while play is happening on the court below.

“Partners can do their standups from up there and it doesn’t interrupt play, so it really gives that ‘I’m here, this is what you feel’ look that is different from the standard court-side whisper seat where you’ve got to be quiet during play. And now we’re thinking about what we can do similarly in Armstrong or the outer courts.”

The biggest technical enhancement this year has been the move to 1080p HDR for the world feed and move away from providing 1080i feeds. “We don’t do any interlace on site at all,” says Petro Mnych, USTA, Director, Technical Broadcast Operations “Previously we’ve made progressive and interlaced available but this year we’re setting a standard that it’s 1080p and then, obviously, when it gets to a rightsholder they can do the conversion to interlace in their own ecosystem.”

Mnych says the move to HDR was a multi-team effort that involved the USTA, NEP, EMG Gravity Media, and ESPN. The core of the HDR coverage is the five main show courts, Arthur Ashe Stadium, Louis Armstrong Stadium, Grandstand, Stadium 17, and Court 5.

“That has been the biggest thing that we’ve really pushed to do this year and obviously that has a huge knock-on effect to what we were doing on the outside courts which are still SDR as well as our legacy archives that are also obviously SDR,” Mnych explains. “We had to put a lot of workflows in place for recalling those clips and then getting them up-LuT’d to HDR because the world feed is fully HDR. We also had to establish how many feeds of HDR we are doing, how many are available in SDR, what are we making available to partners and what are we archiving in HDR.”

The good news for the USTA is that both NEP and EMG Gravity Media have experience with HDR, albeit different. One of the first questions that had to be answered is which Look Up Table or LUT would be used to transform the color and tone of the HDR images.

“We asked ESPN and Gravity to define what LUT they are most comfortable with, and the decision was made to use the BBC lut,” says Mnych. “Fortunately for us, ESPN did a lot of Wimbledon in HDR, and they came here with some good learnings from Wimbledon. And that was important because there is a huge effect on things like SMT or Hawkeye and graphics that have to be able to work in this flavor of HLG. We weren’t just coming in blind and trying to figure it out as the event was going.”

With respect to cameras and HDR most of the cameras are already HDR capable with the switch of a button while others, like some robotic cameras in the player’s tunnel, had to be replaced with newer versions.

“Any camera source on the primary show courts with the exception of the Netcam and a few others are natively HDR,” says Mnych.

The control rooms also have added HDR monitoring as well as AJA FS-HDR converters for uplutting SDR signals but for the most part Mnych says the HDR operations have been centralized into a quality control and engineering area rather than requiring wholesale changes. Camera shading is being done in SDR as there are still 12 courts that are being captured in SDR.

“Even though almost all the cameras on the five show courts are natively pulling in HDR, making sure that they’re solid in SDR just makes it kind of smoother for everybody who’s taking the ISOs because we have more people taking SDR than HDR,” says Mnych. “For the most part it’s been good and it’s always challenging with tennis with skin tones or the LED walls that can change color to not blow things out.”

Mnych says those looking to make the move to HDR should begin with plenty of testing and planning, walking through all the workflows followed by making sure the right people and resources are available to assist on creating new processes.

“There are some very good engineers that we had access to that had done a lot of HDR work and kind of knew some of the pitfalls and some of the risks we were up against,” he adds. “That was hugely beneficial, and we were able to collaborate with them earlier this year and map everything out for things like overall signal flow, storage management and archives.”

For example, with respect to archives the production team had to be more deliberate with the clips they wanted to use as those clips had to first be converted from SDR to HDR before being placed into the EVS system for airing. Editing takes place in SDR and then the edits are up-LuT’d in HDR, allowing those teams to focus on the storytelling side of things rather than HDR technical details.

Storytelling Around the Grounds

For rights holders and the USTA the goal is to continue to bring viewers closer to the event. That includes everything from the player areas to the practice courts to the actual courts to the sponsor activation areas and, of course, the plaza which is literally buzzing with thousands of tennis fans during the day.

“The plaza is packed and it’s such a cool view for ESPN, ESPN International, and Sky Sports who have their sets in the area,” says Navatta. “But our other partners can use the overhangs of Courts 7 and 11 which brings that feel for the viewers at home.”

Bonded cellular transmission systems are making it easier for rights holders to roam and capture the content they want with minimal operational fuss although there are hardwire drops available if the rights holder wants an additional level of reliability.

Adds Navatta: “We’ve continued to support the messaging for our partners who only have ENG crews on-site to prioritize bonded cellular options because despite how hard Broad Comm tries every year to get us more and more spectrum, it has become increasingly limited. So, with the boosted wifi service, our partners can hop on and keep their signal strong. It really becomes this full collaborative effort to make sure we’re delivering everything we possibly can and then trying to make changes and tweaks as the event is going on to really help support those ENG teams.”

Those ENG teams each year require more and more coordination for things like interviews, and unique access for the rights holders. Navatta says the USTA ENG coordination team continues to be world class.

“They take care of the partners and everything they need to coordinate interviews between players, celebrities, the USTA, and activations on the ground as personnel showcase the behind the scenes,” says Navatta. “Every year that team is more and more impressive with the number of interviews that they manage to secure for rights holders, whether it’s in the media garden or the flash interviews.”

The new World Feed Studio is also busy, producing player portraits and interviews in a more private and upscale setting vs. general interview areas.

“Veritone and THUMBWAR work hard to turn all of that content around as soon as it’s available so it can be accessed by our rights holders on the digital media hub,” adds Navatta.

With respect to cameras, the USTA has added a few more robotic cameras to things like the players arrival area and locker corridor to better document players off court movements and continue to give rights holders more content options. All those efforts are part and parcel for a sport that has seen all its four major tournaments become more popular for content creators and documentarians like Netflix whose “Break Point” show continues to resonate with existing fans and creates new ones.

“We have several documentary crews here this year for certain players that follow them or tell their story of the tour in general, and I think a lot of that came from how successful ‘Drive to Survive’ was for Netflix,” says Mnych. “I think a lot of players saw how ‘Break Point’ changed their profile or how that started to engage different people with the sport. The primary focus is still what happens on the court and how we cover that as best we can, but it’s also the storytelling of what happens around the US Open. What are the players doing when they’re not here? What are the players doing when they don’t have a match that day? They still come here and practice and use the facilities and hang out and we added a few more robos this year to expand that coverage. Everybody wants the behind-the-scenes stuff or the additional narratives of things like knowing that two players are best friends.”

An Expanding Event

There was a time when the US Open was a relatively tidy two-week affair when it came to the TV and content production side of things. Qualifying? Who cares about watching those matches? Well, as anyone who pays attention to tennis majors (and almost every other top international sporting event) the answer is more people than you think. And since 2017 the US Open has had “fan week” prior to the start of the tournament, allowing fans free access to the grounds to see players practice, special events, and much more. And this year the grounds drew more than 215,000 fans during the week, an increase of more than 37 percent from last year.

“Now with fan week this is really a three-week event, and our host operations had to be ready four days earlier than last year,” says Mnych. “That posed a challenge because obviously a lot of equipment (and crew) was coming from the Olympics and then Cincinnati finished a day later this year. So just getting things here and being fully functional and ready for the fan week events was a big push. And then we had essentially two full-blown productions on Arthur Ashe, almost to the level of the semifinals, on Tuesday and Wednesday of fan week that ESPN produced.”

Navatta says from a production standpoint the expanded content creation requires two teams: one for the qualifying draw and then a second wave for the main draw.

“That second crew helps bring the energy level back up,” she says. “And then when our partners and rights holders come on site, we actually can give them our attention because we are fully set up.”

The broadcast building this year also has some new folks calling it home as Hawkeye’s production team of around 60 people as well as tennis officials at the center of VAR and automated line calling, is now in the broadcast center rather than elsewhere on the BJK National Tennis Center campus. SMT, whose data services supports a lot of USTA activities, not only just the broadcast side, is also in the building.

“That makes the building feel much more ‘tennis’ and integrated with the tournament officiating and operations teams as opposed to being focused on engineering and equipment rooms,” says Mnych.

Navatta credits all the technology and production partners, like ESPN, EMG Gravity Media, and NEP for working so well together to make all the production efforts throughout the summer a success.

“And then there are the transmission teams from Lumen and IMG as well as Veritone which helps service all of the media across the board,” she says. “And then we have Check Point and Boardwalk Productions filming and creating content that is shared with the world.”

“Something that’s unique about tennis coverage is it’s an all-year sport so many of the vendors become teammates working on this sport all year across the different venues,” she says. “We all know each other and it’s about coming together and creating an awesome event with awesome coverage. But for me it’s a constant learning curve as we have new challenges that only make us better on the operations side. Our core production management team with Thuy Huynh, Jessica Delaney, and Juliette Nuzzi is so strong and ready to support our partner’s operations with anything they need.”