As The Championships heads into its finals weekend, the host broadcast team reflects on providing expanded behind the scenes access, incorporating new drone footage and onboarding its first internet giant.
From a broadcast point of view, SW19 is dormant outside of the annual Wimbledon fortnight, but Wimbledon Broadcast Services (WBS) - the All England Lawn Tennis Club’s (AELTC) in-house host broadcast team - spends the full year on development.
“For the last five years we’ve been in a very good place covering all the tennis across the main draw and last year we began to focus on delivering more in-depth coverage and additional layers of editorial output,” says Paul Davies, Assistant Director, Broadcast, Production & Media Rights, AELTC Wimbledon. “We have had an unprecedented amount of downloads from our central content repository Mediabank.”
The number of beauty cameras has been upgraded to 22 and there are now 26 stand-up positions around the media pavilion which itself has now been completed to offer three levels of glass balcony for broadcaster presentation to overlook the fields of play.
The headline new camera is a drone provided by Aerios Solutions operating from the adjacent golf course. “To get permission we had to be sensitive to players and spectators so that we never impact on their experience,” says Davies. “We did a lot of testing to identify how close we could come to the periphery of the ground and established a red zone where we can and cannot fly. The ability to fly 1500ft for views into Centre and No.1 court is something we couldn’t do before and it gives us sweeping imagery over the lake and a number of other areas over the park.”
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