BTS Wimbledon: ESPN gears up for record breaking year

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ESPN is the biggest international broadcaster for Wimbledon for which it is paying around $95m annually for exclusive rights in the U.S until 2035 (from 2024).  It’s a vital partner to the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) which own the Championship and which manages host broadcast internally under Wimbledon Broadcast Services (WBS).

“Wimbledon is one of the tentpole events on ESPN each year and is a cornerstone of our tennis portfolio,” John Suchenski, ESPN Senior Director, Programming & Acquisitions tells IBC365. “It represents excellence, tradition, and elite competition, values that align perfectly with our brand and the first-class coverage we strive to provide to fans in the U.S.”

To augment WBS’ coverage ESPN has a huge outside broadcast operation in SW19.

Jarrett Baker, ESPN’s Sr Manager, Remote Operations explains: “We do most of the production work live in Wimbledon with hundreds of pieces of equipment that were installed over the week before the main draw begins. We have about 300 people on site working in two full control rooms, a REMI PCR for international use, a large graphics room with five viz engines, replay space for 25 operators, and nine offices that overlook Court 18.”

ESPN is deploying more than 30 unilateral cameras. This includes four coverage cameras on both Centre Court and No. 1 Court along with two cabled handhelds and two RF handhelds roaming the grounds.

Baker says, “It’s a privilege to show off the immaculate grounds and world-class competition with so many bespoke positions.”

Its production also uses about 100 ISO feeds from WBS and there are nearly 500 inputs to the onsite router.

Highlights and magazine style programming are produced both on-site and in the U.S. Linda Schulz, Vice President, Production ESPN, explains, “We have production teams work in shifts to help with time change and the lengthy broadcast windows. The U.S. team focuses on highlights that have been requested by announcers and producers at the end of days’ play to be turned around for coverage in the AM in the UK. The U.S. team also handles our creative and long form creative content. Our team in the UK handles our quick turn analysis packages.”

This year ESPN added an announce (commentator) position at No. 3 Court and an upgraded commentator booth at Court 2.

“At this point we have Commentator booths in five different locations, allowing for a more in-depth presentation as we go from match to match,” Schulz says. “A tremendously exciting new coverage opportunity is additional ‘whisper’ positions, or more commonly known as courtside analysis positions. We now will frequently have reporters or analysts in the stands at Courts 1, 2, 3 and even Centre Court. This access is completely new this year.”

It also made scenic adjustments in Studio 3 to improve the look of virtual graphics. Additionally, ESPN has expanded its virtual graphics package. Last year it was primarily kept to in studio use and one live, static camera, with a handful of templates for content.

“This year we will have much more expansive content and storytelling presentations, as well as alternate camera options,” Schulz says.

Last year’s ratings for the women’s and men’s finals were ESPN’s best in six years, helped by the Jannik Sinner v Carlos Alcaraz battle to which 4 million people tuned in. The whole two weeks of Championship 2025 was ranked the fourth-best Wimbledon broadcast in ESPN’s history averaging 721,000 total viewers—6% higher than 2024—across more than 250 hours of coverage watched on ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2.

The out-of-retirement story of 23-time Grand Slam winner Serena Williams and her sister Venus are a key editorial focus for the US broadcaster. ESPN plans to document both player journey’s from start to finish and wrap that coverage with virtual graphics, features and reports throughout all ESPN platforms.

“Beyond that, we love the opportunity of stories on both sides,” Schultz says. “Each of the last nine Wimbledon’s have featured a different ladies’ champion, the longest streak in tournament history. And on the Gentlemen’s side, Novak Djokovic is seeking his 25th all-time major singles title, which would break the tie with Margaret Court for most Gentlemen’s or Ladies’. But he has to get through the defending Champions Jannik Sinner and without Carlos Alcaraz, the door is cracked open for a spoiler to both Djokovic and Sinner.”

SIGNALS: A New Way to Experience Wimbledon

For decades, watching Wimbledon has meant following the TV broadcast but this format increasingly feels out of place in a world where fans demand interaction and new technology enables them to experience it.

SIGNALS is the BBC’s attempt to do something about that. It’s a new interactive layer built by BBC R&D and available during Centre Court matches at this Championships.

“Wimbledon has always been a shared national moment, watched and debated in real time but audience expectations have changed,” explains Laura Harrison, Principal product manager at BBC R&D. “People want to interact and feel part of what’s happening on court,”

Running as an internet‑delivered layer alongside the live broadcast, rather than as a second screen, SIGNALS blends real‑time participation with live match data. Among other things it enables viewers to answer quizzes at key moments then instantly seeing how others across the UK respond.

“You’re not just watching a match unfold, you’re seeing the collective read of it evolve in real time,” she says.

The official live ball‑tracking data is also being used to surface match insights displayed through on‑screen overlays. For example, a continuously updating ‘dominance graph’ shows who is in control and how momentum shifts. A ‘winners view’ highlights which shots are working and ‘Serve Performance’ cards and animated serve‑speed overlays bring clarity to these shots.

“Tennis produces a huge amount of data, but much of it has traditionally been out of reach during live play,” she adds. For fans, SIGNALS turns that data into “clear stories that make matches easier to follow and more engaging.”

This also  creates a real-time feedback loop, which BBC R&D say helps broadcasters understand audience behaviour in real time and therefore to shape editorial decisions as matches unfold.

BBC R&D thinking also extends into current affairs, reality and entertainment shows. Ideas include scoring a routine on Strictly at the exact moment the judges lift their paddles; choosing which route contestants should take in Race Across the World or responding live to discussion points on Question Time creating a live snapshot of the national mood.

Wimbledon is the first public outing for the prototype. BBC R&D suggest it’s a glimpse of how television might reclaim attention “not by competing with everything else in the room, but by bringing the interactions back to the TV screen itself.”

Stakeholders in UK DTT switch-off fight over timelines

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The saga of the UK’s switchover to an all-broadband TV future moved up a notch with the publication of a government paper Watch this Space: A new strategic direction for UK media that offers twin-tracks to an inevitable transition.

A fast-tracked scheme to switch off the digital terrestrial TV (DTT) network favoured by public service broadcasters (PSBs) including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5 would be complete by 2034. A decade long extension to ensure universal access to PSB content is guaranteed is, not surprisingly, favoured by transmission provider Arqiva whose current contract for DTT provision expires in 2034.

Financial ratings agency S&P subsequently said of Arqiva, “A potential 2034 shutdown represents a downside scenario to our rating. Furthermore, Arqiva continues to face structural headwinds as the accelerating shift toward IPTV threatens its long-term earnings.”

The PSB argument for 2034

Essentially this boils down to cost. Cash-strapped PSBs

A Future TV Taskforce, which comprises UK PSBs and Everyone TV (a free TV platform run by the PSBs that supports IPTV (Freely) PTV),  terrestrial (Freeview) and satellite (Freesat) delivery welcomed the proposals as recognising the consumer-led shift towards internet‑delivered television.

Jonathan Thompson, chair of the Future TV Taskforce and CEO of Everyone TV, said, “As part of a wider move towards a fully inclusive digital society in the mid-2030s, we support a carefully managed transition in which no one is left behind.”

They provided figures that the number of UK homes without broadband was 1.2 million at the end of 2025 and that this would drop to 220,000 by 2034.

Maintaining a nationwide DTT infrastructure to service this minority is considered by the BBC to be “inappropriate for the corporation and licence fee payers” and would threaten cuts in content.

Media regulator Ofcom said as such in its review of public service media last year: “Within the next few years delivering TV universally on DTT will go from being a significant benefit to the PSBs, to a substantial obligation they will need to finance. This would mean more investment being diverted into distribution, rather than commissioning content that benefits all audiences and the creative industries.”

Commercial PSBs make a similar point in the paper, warning that “any additional investment in distribution reduces the funds available for investment in UK content.”

In addition, they say that 97% of households would have nothing more to pay if DTT was replaced with IPTV today. Since 95% already pay for broadband and 56% of non-internet users already pay for a landline telephone and these lines will be replaced by IP-delivered lines in the next two years.

The case for 2044

Incumbent tech provider Arqiva played on fears that a poorly managed transition “would be consumer sensitive, reinforcing the case to consider a more cautious, hybrid approach rather than a simple ‘runway’ to IPTV.”

It commissioned an alternative view which projects a higher figure of about 2.9 million households by 2025 that would use still require a DTT tuner as the primary means of watching linear on the main TV.

It also claimed that DTT “offers secure, resilient distribution because Arqiva is held to service levels that do not apply to IPTV.”

This is particularly important during national events and emergencies, when IP networks may be congested or unavailable.

Arqiva proposes to switch to a hybrid Freeview service from 2034 including an upgrade from DVB-T to DVB-T2 using MPEG-4 AVC. All legacy DVB-T capacity would be retired from 2035 and replaced by three DVB-T2 multiplexes, one PSB multiplex at about 98.5% coverage and two commercial multiplexes both at about 90% coverage.

Doing so would reduce DTT transmission charges from about £231 million a year today to about £139m from 2035 or roughly £123m if the DVB-T2 refresh is funded from auctioning off some of the DTT spectrum for mobile operation.

The share of these Arqiva charges falling to the PSBs would drop accordingly from £156m today to £87m a year (or £78m with auction funding). These figures exclude broadcasters’ own distribution, coding and multiplexing costs, as well as wider implementation costs.

Yet this modelling cuts no ice with the PSBs. In the Paper they call even the £78m annual charge “unmanageably high post 2034.”

Their assessment is that the cost of maintaining a universal PSB multiplex, particularly for commercial PSBs, would exceed their ability to operate it economically while continuing to deliver PSB content to all audiences.

Over a decade the cost to maintain DTT would run close to £1 billion.

The case for better DTT

There is a group who are happy with neither approach. TV manufacturers and operating system  providers, represented by techUK-CE-S\&T describe wants the DTT infrastructure to be beefed up to DVB-T2 using HEVC and therefore pave the way for UHD channel upgrades.

They point out that other European markets are demonstrating “credible” pro-DTT pathways; upgrading DTT to support HD and UHD (France and Spain) or using DVB-I to integrate broadcast and IP services (Germany and Italy).

The upgraded platform would not support more efficient codecs but addressable advertising would be enabled in more homes, it argues (although by IP connectivity rather than by DVB-T2 itself(. A refreshed platform would also keep open the prospect of future 5G broadcast services, subject to viable use cases and device support.

What’s next?

A switch-off date will now be set, with ministers consulting on the two potential timelines.  An announcement is due by end of the year.

The government itself has hinted that it favours 2024. Media minister Ian Murray said: “We are leaning in the green paper to 2034 because there are massive benefits. The really important thing is no one is left behind and we will have a very strong strategy from government to ensure that is the case.”

However, a poll found that nearly half of respondents would oppose paying the £180 licence fee if its content were only available online.

UK to force social media to tweak algorithms in favour of PSBs

The document also contains proposals to give greater prominence and discoverability to UK PSB content on social media platforms.

The regulator said broadcasters should work “urgently” with YouTube to ensure their content was easy to find on fair commercial terms, describing this as particularly important for news and children’s programming.

The government claims the plan would make it easier for people to find trusted news sources online and could legislate to bring about the change.

The move comes as media consumption continues to shift online. According to Ofcom, social media is now the primary source of news for three-quarters of 16-24 year-olds, while more than half of UK adults use social platforms to access news.

Despite this news on the BBC and ITV are still seen as more trustworthy than other sources found online and on social media.

Rules of this kind already apply to TV. The Media Act 2024 requires connected platforms such as smart TVs and streaming sticks to give prominence to public service on-demand services, including iPlayer and ITVX.

The UK government has already announced a ban on under-16s using social media platforms from next spring.

Separately, the Green Paper suggests widening the number of key sports events that are mandatory to be made available for free on traditional TV and online. The current list of events including the soccer World Cup, the Olympics, the FA Cup, the Grand National, and Wimbledon tennis.

 

 

 

Why media networks are being rewired for the speed of light

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The elimination of OB trucks is just the start of the light revolution. For the media industry, a rewiring of the transport network from electrons to photons promises to unlock AI‑driven production, immersive formats, and globalised workflows while dramatically cutting energy consumption.

“Bandwidth demand has exploded,” says Dr. Masahisa Kawashima, IOWN Technology Director at Japanese telco NTT. “What used to be less than one gigabit per customer is now tens of gigabits for media applications, and hundreds of gigabits for AI workloads.”

Momentum is building behind photonics – laser light - as replacement for electronics. An All Photonics Network (APN) has gained the support of 170 major telcos, device and chip vendors and internet powerhouses including Nokia, Ericsson, Orange, KDDI, Intel, Nvidia, Cisco, Ciena, Samsung, Sony, Microsoft and Google under the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) Global Forum.

“UHD contribution, multi‑camera remote production, VR capture, and AI‑assisted workflows have all accelerated bandwidth demand far beyond what legacy electrical switching architectures were designed to handle,” says Kawashima, who is also Chair of the IOWN Global Forum’s Technology Working Group. “At the same time, AI workloads, particularly large‑scale model training and inference, have introduced traffic patterns that are both bursty and massive, often exceeding hundreds of gigabits per second per node. The bottleneck is the network.”

Optical transport technologies have long been used to connect routers and switches in data networks. Traditionally, these routers and switches connect electrically through a telecom carrier’s optical transport system. But bandwidth demand is reaching a point where this model is no longer efficient.

The IOWN initiative proposes to move long‑distance optical transport capabilities directly into customer premises equipment (CPE), enabling end‑to‑end photonic paths with minimal electrical conversion.

“Optical transport technology has evolved to the extent that it’s both practical and cost effective to deploy long‑distance optical systems directly at customer sites,” he says.

For decades, electrons have been the carriers of data inside devices, performing all computation and routing. But electrons come with limits: heat generation, power inefficiency, and bandwidth bottlenecks. Every time a signal switches between optical and electronic domains, latency and energy cost increase.

Photonics replaces some of these electrical pathways with optical ones, allowing data to travel at the speed of light while reducing energy consumption dramatically.

The result, according to NTT, is to reduce power consumption to one-hundredth of existing output, increase data capacity 125 times and slash network latency to a fraction of a percent of its current levels.

True virtual remote production

For broadcasters and live‑production companies, the implications are profound. Media networks are increasingly indistinguishable from data‑centre networks. Today’s live production workflows still rely heavily on outside broadcast vans, specialist crews, and on‑site infrastructure.

“OB vans are expensive, and broadcasters can only own a limited number,” Kawashima says “Skilled editing crews are another bottleneck.”

APN changes the equation, he claims. By enabling direct, high‑bandwidth optical connectivity from venues to centralised production hubs, “APN removes the need for OB vans and dramatically reduces on‑site staffing. The result is a more flexible, scalable, and financially sustainable model.”

By eliminating the buffering resulting from optical-to-electrical-to-optical conversions in current networking latency is deterministic – ideal for live cloud switching.

“In media production, from multi-camera sports coverage to immersive, free-viewpoint experiences, precise synchronisation is critical,” says ,” Katsutoshi Itoh, Chair of the Use Case Working Group at IOWN and head of Sony’s Swedish R&D lab. “Even minor latency variations can disrupt 3D reconstruction and real-time interactivity. APN means predictable, tightly controlled timing across the network.”

This shifts the bottleneck from physical logistics to network provisioning and unlocks the long‑tail of live content. “With lower production overheads, broadcasters can cover more events (local sports, niche competitions, cultural performances) that were previously uneconomical.”

Tests have been made: Sony and Japanese broadcaster TBS claimed the first successful remote production a live music event using APN. 64 audio streams from The Japan Record Awards held at Tokyo’s New National Theatre were relayed for remote production to TBS’s Akasaka studio with a roundtrip of 5 milliseconds.

Enabling AR, holography, and 6DoF video

Emerging formats such as 6DoF video, volumetric capture, holographic replay and AR overlays for live events require multi‑camera arrays and significant AI compute. These workloads generate enormous traffic between capture nodes and compute clusters.

“APN is essential for these,” says Kawashima. He points to the VAR-style Automated Balls and Strikes (ABS) challenge system introduced for MLB baseball coverage this season. It uses 12 Hawk-Eye cameras placed around the stadium that continuously track the baseball in 3D.

“AI synthesises entirely new viewpoints—angles that no single camera could capture,” he says. “This six‑degree‑of‑freedom video experience is a glimpse of what’s coming. APN provides the bandwidth and low latency needed to make them practical.”

How APN integrates with today’s networks

Crucially, APN does not require ripping out existing carrier infrastructure. Instead, it changes where the optical transceivers live.

The key component are Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) transceivers that convert electrical signals into optical signals and vice versa, using multiple wavelengths to send information through a single fibre optic cable.

Carriers already operate optical transport systems, and those remain in place. The difference is where the optical transceivers sit. Today, they are installed in the carrier’s transport equipment. In APN, the transceivers are installed directly in the customer’s routers and switches, which then connect directly to the carrier’s optical infrastructure.”

“The most efficient method,” Kawashima explains, “is to connect customer routers and switches directly to a DWDM optical network. Directly connecting customer routers and switches with optical transport transceivers is already feasible today.”

Optical transceivers themselves are currently more expensive, but Kawashima expects the market to evolve quickly. “Think of smartphones,” he says. “The components inside are extremely expensive, yet business models make them accessible. The same will happen with APN transceivers.”

Industry consensus required

The next challenge is ecosystem alignment. IOWN was preceded in 2015 by OpenROADM which similarly aims to define and promote open optical data plane specifications. Its supporters include AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, NTT and Cisco.

Other vendor and carrier‑led groups have emerged to promote their own compute and optical technologies. These include the Open Compute Project (OCP - which has Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Google on its steering committee) and the OCI MSA (Optical Compute Interconnect Multi-Source Agreement) group which intends to establish an open, interoperable optical interconnect specification for AI. It’s also backed by Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia plus Broadcom and OpenAI.

“We have a strong collaboration with the OCP,” says Kawashima. “Together we’ve launched the AI Computing Continuum, which aims to define technology standards for a computing space spanning multiple clouds and edges.

“What differentiates IOWN is that we define concrete use cases—financial data centres, remote media streaming—and then specify end‑to‑end system designs. With that foundation, we collaborate with consortia like OCP and OpenROADM.

OCI MSA launched in February and IOWN is yet to engage directly. But Kawashima believes it will appreciate IOWN’s work “because we define use cases for their optical devices and show how customers can build full end‑to‑end systems using them.”

Interoperability for APN requires standardised long‑reach coherent transceivers suitable for CPE as well as operational models for provisioning photonic paths directly to enterprise sites.

“Once interoperability standards are established, the cost impact will be modest,” he says.

2030 APN roadmap

IOWN’s 2030 roadmap is ambitious: a global computing and communications fabric built on photonics, low‑latency architectures, and distributed AI. Parts of this vision are already commercially deployed.

NTT launched its first APN services in Japan two to three years ago, initially offering 100 Gbps connectivity in limited regions. Coverage and performance have been expanding ever since. Higher throughput, with per‑customer links scaling to 100G, 400G, and beyond is envisaged.

“The basic concept is already in service,” he says. “We continue to upgrade, but the foundation is real.”

Emerging architectures such as co-packaged optics (CPO) bring optical data transceivers directly next to compute chips, cutting power and latency by shortening conversion distances.

Nvidia is building CPO networking switches to scale AI for industrial use. Other developers are lining up to incorporate optical semiconductors, switchers and interconnects including Twinstar Technologies, Delta Electronics, and Corning Incorporated.

Beyond this, technologies like optical interposers and fully all-optical computing systems, where photons handle processing without conversion, are rapidly progressing.

One of the most urgent use cases is sovereign AI infrastructure. Nations are racing to build regional AI clouds to maintain competitiveness, but high‑performance compute is only half the story. “You must also connect customer locations to these AI systems with enough bandwidth,” Kawashima says.

Financial services are another early adopter. As banks transform into digital‑platform‑driven businesses, ultra‑low‑latency, high‑bandwidth connectivity becomes essential. Photonics offers both.

Photonics and the Quantum future

Looking further ahead, photonics will be essential for quantum computing. Quantum systems will be centralised in specialised data centres, not distributed to every enterprise. The challenge will be moving enormous matrix‑based datasets in and out of those facilities.

“High‑bandwidth, low‑latency connectivity will be critical,” Kawashima says. “APN is well suited to that requirement.

Oriole Networks, which spun out of UCL in 2023, set out to build the highest-performing AI network imaginable, “pushing toward theoretical limits” with photonics as a key enabler.

“It is a massively performant AI network based on incredibly efficient photonics,” says CEO James Regan of his company’s PRISM platform which boasts a 50 Exabit per second throughput.

The Netherlands is another photonics hotspot. Eindhoven-based Photon Bridge’s laser‑on‑silicon approach “redefines photonic integration to make light scalable, manufacturable, and infrastructure-ready.​”

“Photonics is the physical foundation of the next digital economy,” says Mark Rushworth,  founder and CEO of UK start up Finchetto which is working on an optical packet switch. “AI, quantum computing, and cloud networking all depend on the ability to move and process data faster, cooler, and smarter. In the ongoing race to optimisation, light wins every time.”

 

Sheffield Documentary Festival: “We need to be more weird”

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Funding remains a puzzle but the documentary and fact-ent genres are thriving at Sheffield Documentary Festival.

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Sheffield DocFest is one of the world’s most influential markets for documentary projects and this year’s edition proved the breadth health of the genre despite funding issues.

With Netflix and other premium streamers prioritising celebrity led promos and traditional broadcaster funding squeezed financially and politically, especially in the US where investigative and diversity programming is being shelved, YouTube has emerged as a saviour of sorts.

One question that repeatedly cropped up at the event in Sheffield (June 10-13) is what happens to truth when we rely on platforms built for engagement?

YouTube’s growing force as doc platform

 Julian Carrington, Executive Director of the Documentary Organisation of Canada, said,  “Commissioning models are changing, public institutions are under pressure, audiences are fragmenting,” he said. “At the same time, broadcasters are making YouTube a much more significant pillar of their strategy. That raises questions about discoverability, sustainability, rights and public‑service media.”

For some producers, YouTube has become a core creative and commercial engine. Josh Reynolds, executive producer at UK studio Zandland, said the platform is “in our DNA,” with the company now averaging 10 million monthly impressions and over half a million deep‑watch views. “We know what our audience wants because the data is instantaneous,” he said. “Speed is the biggest opportunity. If we have a strong idea, we can act immediately.”

Docs were Channel 4’s most successful genre on YouTube in the last year. In 2025 it recorded 22.6 billion minutes viewed, “which sounds like ridiculously big number, but it is, and that's because we're prioritising long-form content,” explained Alex Morris, Managing Director of Channel 4’s social-first division, 4Studio (speaking at  Creative Cities Convention last month).

The broadcaster is now building communities around docs on social platforms Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. In January, its launch month, C4’s docs Facebook page garnered 69 million views and 144,000 followers.

“There seems to be real audience demand coalescing around that factual content slightly on the spicier, edgier side of things,” he added.

Reynolds described YouTube as the foundation of a circular development strategy. “Everything we make on YouTube has to have a second life — something we can pitch to the BBC, Netflix, Amazon or Hulu,” he said. “It’s where we build community. That’s where our future is.”

But others warned that the shift to YouTube is being driven less by opportunity and more by crisis. Debra Zimmerman, Executive Director of Women Make Movies, said the US public‑broadcasting landscape has been destabilised by government cuts. “Right now, it’s a response to an emergency,” she said. “PBS is turning to YouTube and asking for worldwide rights. That wipes out filmmakers’ ability to earn revenue elsewhere.”

Zimmerman cited two Women Make Movies titles licensed to US public service broadcaster  ITVS that later appeared on YouTube without the filmmakers’ involvement. “One film even had its title changed,” she said. “There was no revenue, no access to audience data, and no control over how the work was presented.”

She warned that while YouTube can deliver large audiences, it risks undermining the ecosystem that sustains independent documentary. “Festivals build careers. Awards build careers. Rights matter,” she said. “If everything moves to YouTube without safeguards, we risk losing the structures that allow filmmakers to make their next film.”

Behind the scenes on 70Up.

Asif Kapadia likened being asked to direct 70UP to “taking on The Godfather Part 4 with all the original cast”.

He is stepping into the role held for decades by the late Michael Apted and guiding the landmark documentary series to its final chapter. “It is one of the most influential factual franchises in television history,” he said. “My challenge was to make something that didn’t mess it up but also to make it feel like we were closing a circle.”

The Up series began in 1964, when Granada Television set out to film a group of seven‑year‑olds from sharply contrasting backgrounds across Britain, never intending to revisit them again. But the filmmakers returned to the children at 14, establishing a  seven‑year cycle.

Series producer Claire Lewis has been involved in the project for 47 years. She explained that it was built around the Jesuit maxim ‘Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man’.”

“It evolved into a unique social document,” she said. “A study of who we become, and why.”

They were joined on stage by Jo Clinton Davis, Controller of Factual, ITV, Mike Blair (Creative Director, Multistory Media) and two cast members (Sue Fitzgerald and Bruce Balden).

For the final chapter, Kapadia pushed deeper into the archive than before, digitising and syncing original 16mm rushes to uncover unseen material. He retained the franchise’s signature absence of score, adding music only to the opening sequence to help new audiences understand the scale and emotional sweep of the project.

“Young people who’ve seen that opening (which shows cast members at different ages of their life) say they’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “They thought it was done by AI.”

He believes the Up films remain a profound study of parenting, environment and the nature‑versus‑nurture debate. “The first seven years of a child’s life are the most important,” he said. “Two children can grow up in the same home and be completely different. It’s the most human thing I’ve ever worked on.”

Katie Price: “I let them film everything”

There’s a strange parallel between Up and a new Sky documentary charting the trials and tribulations of Katie Price, the first episode of which was premiered in Sheffield. From a working class background her highs and lows have been lived out almost daily in front of our eyes for four decades.

“The media has always shown her through the lens of tabloids, reality TV or social media each with its own agenda,” said series producer Phelan Glen. “What fascinated me was her combination of resilience and vulnerability. I wanted to understand where that fortitude comes from.”

Katie Price: Nothing to Hide charts the emergence of Price’s alter ego ‘Jordan’ on Page 3 of The Sun in 1996, her marriages, motherhood and multi-million pound contracts to cosmetic surgery and bankruptcy.  Originally commissioned as three parts, the series expanded to four to accommodate the material.

“When we first assembled it, we realised there was too much story,” said director Paddy Wivell. “We had to make tough choices and prioritised stories where we had access, contributors, and emotional depth.”

Price herself said she had only seen the first two episodes and that the production team refused to tell her who had contributed or what they had said.

 “When they asked if there were any areas I didn’t want them to go, I said no. They could talk to anyone,” she said.

“I’ve put a lot of trust in this team. When I saw the scene with Gareth [Gates], I was shocked. There are revelations about what we both thought 25 years ago and Paddy kept it all from me until I watched it.”

The production made more than 100 initial approaches to contributors with the biggest challenge persuading those people who had been burned by past media coverage.

“Gareth’s’ relationship with Katie Price had been heavily sensationalised,” executive producer Arron Fellows said. “We went back and forth for seven months. But once he understood that we were being honest not salacious, he agreed.”

Sky Documentaries’ head of commissioning Hayley Reynolds said the series also charts how attitudes to women, class and fame have shifted over three decades. “Katie has always been at the intersection of classism and sexism. She was a trailblazer in monetising her life long before social media made it normal.”

Price admitted that some filming days were “overwhelming” and that reliving certain moments was hard.

“But that’s what makes a good documentary,” she added. “I’m not polished. I’m not manufactured. I let them film everything.”

The need for weird

Andrea Arnold, the director of Red Road, Fish Tank and American Honey urged first time filmmakers to be more weird.

“If a film is only 50% on Rotten Tomatoes I’m more likely to watch that than one at 90% because it means some people really didn’t like it and that interests me,” she said on stage giving a retrospective of her career.

“We need to be more weird don’t we? What seems to be happening is that [filmmakers] are meant to fit an algorithm, into a box. I think filmmaking should be as unique and original and as weird as you can be. That’s what I love. Someone’s unique perspective.”

Arnold described herself as a visual filmmaker and that the conception of projects like Cow or Wuthering Heights begin with an image.

“I never set out thinking, ‘I’m going to write a film about X’. It usually starts with an image that I can’t shake. With Fish Tank, it was an image of a girl peeing on the carpet in a living room — really hard, like she meant it.

That image forces questions. I start writing to answer them. ‘Whose living room is that? Why is she doing that? Thow the story grows.”

She is not beholden to her scripts, preferring to work spontaneously with what happens on set.

“The script is a beginning. Then you have the people, the place, the day. I love being open to what’s happening right in front of me. If the sun doesn’t show up, or something unexpected happens, that becomes part of the film. There’s always a bit of chaos.”

 

BBC embraces home-based production for World Cup coverage

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Last December, the BBC caught some flack when it announced that it would be presenting coverage of the World Cup 2026 from studios in the UK. While hybrid production models that combine on-site reporting with centralised studio operations are an increasing feature of broadcaster approaches to major sports events (NBC retains huge editorial teams in the US for coverage of recent Olympics, for example), such is the interest in the UK’s national sport at its most prestigious tournament that eyebrows were raised when it was claimed yesterday that pundits would be remotely commentating on matches from a “green box” at BBC Sport HQ near Manchester.

That the BBC has previously been criticised for sending too many staff and talent to cover overseas events seems lost on media reporting on the Corporation’s cost cutting decision.

Not only will the move save “a few million” pounds but it is being framed as environmentally friendly by reducing carbon waste by 19% compared with the Qatar World Cup 2022, according to the BBC.

Furthermore, with matches kicking off local time throughout the early morning (12am-03am) there are editorial arguments that being shown to be present at the ground is of less importance than it would be for extended daytime schedules.

The sheer scale of this World Cup, even were it to be hosted in the US alone, makes travel between venues and accommodation a logistical and budget stretch for any broadcaster.

In any case, the BBC is not grounding its coverage against green screen. That technology is outmoded and replace by virtual sets which can deliver a far greater sense of immersive presence at an event even one over 4000km distant.

For the upcoming tournament, the BBC is adopting a fully LED-powered virtual production environment at Dock10 in MediaCity, Salford.

“We’re still delivering hybrid coverage,” explains BBC Sport Design Director John Murphy. “But given the scale of the tournament, along with the practical realities of travel and sustainability, this approach makes far more operational sense.”

The strategy builds on experience gained during Euro 2024, when the BBC successfully blended XR graphics with live scenery from Berlin, including views of the Brandenburg Gate. However, Murphy acknowledges that creating the same sense of authenticity within a fully virtual environment presents a new challenge.

“In Berlin, we were working with a real location and enhancing it with XR elements,” he explains. “This time we’re starting with a blank canvas, so the challenge is how to create a space that still feels genuine and connected to the tournament.”

To achieve this, the BBC is combining LED volume technology, physical set elements, real-world imagery, AI-assisted workflows, and game-engine-generated environments. Rather than attempting to recreate host cities through photorealistic video alone, the production team is developing stylised virtual spaces inspired by the architecture, culture, and atmosphere of the World Cup’s host nations.

According to Murphy, the aim is to create “a space and a feeling” that captures the identity of the 16 host cities in the US, Mexico and Canada. The digital backdrop will be tweaked to reflect the weather and time of day at each venue.

Technically, the setup will include four cameras, a jib, Mo-Sys camera tracking, LED walls and flooring, and end-to-end HDR production workflows. The transition to HDR has been one of the project’s more complex aspects, prompting the BBC to draw on specialist expertise and technologies already established in the US sports broadcasting market.

Dock10 and Pixotope play key roles in the production pipeline, while graphics specialist AE Live and several other vendors contribute to the wider workflow. One of the project’s biggest lessons has been recognising the additional complexity that full LED virtual production introduces compared with traditional green-screen operations.

“We probably went into it a little naively,” Murphy admits. “It quickly became clear that this isn’t simply an extension of green-screen production. There are many more technologies, partners, and interdependencies involved.”

Extensive testing has also influenced the creative direction. Early plans to use real camera footage as virtual backgrounds proved challenging due to the level of precision required to maintain accurate perspective and parallax. As a result, the production team has shifted towards more flexible game-engine-generated environments built from processed still imagery and AI-enhanced assets.

Importantly, the BBC sees the investment as more than a single-tournament solution. The LED infrastructure is expected to become part of future football production workflows, providing a long-term foundation for programmes such as Match of the Day and other studio-based sports coverage.

In the UK the BBC historically splits rights to the World Cup with rival ITV. The commercial broadcaster has 50 matches and the BBC will air 54. Both will show the final live. 

For the first time, BBC Sport will deliver World Cup coverage across YouTube, TikTok and social channels - from live match streaming, alternative second screen watch-alongs and instant post-match reaction. Fans are also promised immersive VR experiences following every England and Scotland match.

FIFA World Cup 2026: The 104‑Super Bowl Broadcast Machine

Streaming Media

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On the eve of kick-off the scale of FIFA World Cup 2026 still staggers. FIFA president Gianni Infantino has compared the undertaking to “104 Super Bowls,” with a global audience of six billion predicted to watch some of the 104 matches packed into 39 days from 16 venues across the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

This ambition has prompted a shift to a fully centralised production model anchored at the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) in Dallas. Centralisation saves a lot of money in travel and logistics but the bigger factor is editorial consistency.

Lessons from last summer’s FIFA Club World Cup in the US proved invaluable, particularly around staffing, logistics, and assessing new directors. Working with local crews gave FIFA and Host Broadcast Services (HBS) a clearer picture of available talent, from replay operators to camera teams.

For 2026, FIFA is deploying 16 dedicated venue crews — one per stadium — rather than rotating a smaller pool. They will be supported by seven centralised replay teams based in Dallas.

The IBC is the operational hub for replay, graphics, camera shading, VAR (the official Video Assistant Referee), data processing, and stadium IPTV. More than 2,000 personnel from media partners will work onsite alongside FIFA’s production and tech teams.

Each stadium will host around 50 commentary positions and a routing infrastructure capable of serving roughly 50 media partners per match. While the core world‑feed philosophy remains unchanged (football is still directed primarily from Camera One, center and high in the stand) digital demands have transformed the scale of content creation.

Each match will be host produced in six dedicated camera feeds offered to rights holders, plus ISO feeds per match. On top of which more than 10,000 hours of shoulder content is being programmed.

Matchday directors and crew have been hired in from across Europe, South America, Australia, and beyond. To maintain quality, FIFA and HBS will rely on detailed editorial guidelines and a robust QC operation that provides live feedback and match reports.

Camera plan

All 104 matches will receive premium coverage with 45 cameras, including Polecams, Cablecams, ultra‑motion and super‑slow‑motion units, cine‑style cameras, 360° systems, and aerial/drone coverage (subject to US/Canada/Mexico regulations). FPV drones remain under evaluation due to regulatory and insurance hurdles.

For the Round of 32, additional ultra‑motion and isolated player cameras will be added. The plan is designed not just for broadcast but for every platform — a nod to the fact that the most downloaded shot of Qatar 2022 was a Lionel Messi celebration captured on an iPhone.

EVS’ AI‑powered XtraMotion will be used to generate super slow‑motion from any camera, including a new Cinematic mode that simulates shallow depth of field. Two replay specialists are producing a guide to ensure consistent application.

A Referee View camera mounted on the official’s chest will see action. This was developed by FIFA’s Football Technology & Innovation team, was considered a success at the Club World Cup 2025. It will be used sparingly to preserve impact and features AI‑enabled stabilisation.

Lenovo, which is FIFA’s official tech sponors, claim that its AI tech is being used to stabilize Referee Views and ”deliver first-person perspectives with up to 50% less motion distortion.”

Signal workflow

All camera feeds travel via Verizon’s contribution network to the IBC for graphics overlay (produced by AE Live) and onward distribution. Replay operators will also work from the IBC rather than stadiums, with onsite backups for redundancy.

Distribution uses IP (via SRT) and satellite, and for the first time remote partners can access the same router as those onsite.

FIFA’s post‑production hub for production of non-live programming, however, is not in Dallas — or even in the US. It is based in London to tap into the UK’s deep pool of editing talent and also to reduce travel costs.

3D VAR avatars & AI tools

As Official Technology Partner, Lenovo is supplying AI‑generated 3D player avatars for semi‑automated offside replays. Each player was scanned in a one‑second process before the tournament, producing unique models that improve visual accuracy for VAR and fans.

Lenovo has also developed Football AI Pro, an analytics tool available to all 48 teams. Trained on “hundreds of millions” of FIFA data points, it generates insights in text, video, graphs, and 3D visualisations — a levelling tool for emerging nations such as Curaçao and Cabo Verde.

Lenovo is also claiming to have helped reduce the delay in the live feed for FIFA’s official in-stadia screens to under 5 seconds. It is providing servers and other ‘technology’ to ingest and process “massive volumes of live video data” to distribute that content “in close to real-time via ten channels to over 1,000 screens” throughout FIFA venues. This is said to enable near real-time access to live match action and more synchronized viewing experiences.

 

FIFA World Cup: A cyber criminal’s cash cow

IBC

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Alongside financially motivated cyber crime, politically motivated hacktivists are also likely to target organisations linked to the tournament through distributed denial-of-service attacks, website defacements and disinformation campaigns.

The FIFA World Cup will be the largest, most digitally connected sporting event ever staged. Billions of viewers, millions of devices, sprawling broadcast infrastructure, and a three‑nation footprint create a perfect storm of opportunity for cyber-attack.

“This tournament will face more sophisticated, more automated, and more politically charged cyber-attacks than any event before it,” warns Darren Anstee, CTO for security at Netscout.

The scale of the tournament across the U.S, Canada and Mexico dramatically increases the potential attack surface for criminals and hacktivists alike.

Matt Hull, VP of Cyber Intelligence and Response at Manchester-headquartered global cyber security firm, NCC Group says the 2026 World Cup will present cyber criminals with “the biggest opportunity to make money this year”, as threat actors increasingly exploit global sporting events for fraud, disruption and political activism.

All the host nations recorded an increase in the weekly average number of cyber-attacks  in April 2026 compared to both March 2026 and April 2025.

A history of attacks

Cyber-attacks targeting major sporting events are nothing new. “Pretty much every single one of them over the last 20 years has seen attack activity,” Anstee explains. The severity varies depending on geopolitics, the host nation, and even the sponsors involved.

During the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, a China-linked crime group reportedly hacked into a major telecommunications provider, syphoning customer data and with potential to blackout live streaming of the games. Cybercriminals stole personal data from 15000 Uefa customers during Euros 2024; the French authorities recorded over 500 cybersecurity events during the Paris Olympics and earlier this year, Russian hackers targeted foreign ministry offices and Winter Olympics sites, including hotels in Cortina.

Anstee explains that attackers begin probing infrastructure six months before the event and ramp up again three months out.

“During the event, attacks spike around opening ceremonies, closing ceremonies, and high‑profile matches,” he says. “Some attackers aim for real disruption like taking services offline and keeping them down. Others simply want attention, using the global spotlight to amplify their political or ideological message.”

What makes 2026 different is the combination of geopolitical tension, automation, and scale. The last five years have seen a surge in activist‑driven cyberattacks linked to conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, and other flashpoints.

“This is a great opportunity for activists to get out their messages,” Hull says. “Being able to take down services that are associated with this event to impact the reputation of North America in general.”

DDoS

A major concern are Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks where the aim is to disrupt or take down the live stream. Netscout has identified over 100 groups actively using DDoS as a tool. Their attack campaigns, which can last days or many weeks, fall into three major categories.

Anstee explains, “The ones grabbing the headlines happen when the network is flooded by 20-30 terabits designed to overwhelm connectivity. If you fill the pipe everything behind it is unreachable.”

So-called ‘state‑exhaustion’ attacks target firewalls and load balancers with extremely high packet rates, overwhelming their ability to track connections.

The most sophisticated, and the hardest to detect, are application‑layer attacks. In this type of attack, bots behave like real users. They connect over TLS, even logging in and issuing queries.

“They are mimicking normal behaviour but at scale, they crush the application’s ability to serve legitimate users,” Anstee says. “There are also more supply‑chain dependencies and more legitimate traffic sources making geolocation filtering harder. It makes the threat surface bigger and it makes simple things harder.”

Every digital service associated with the tournament represents a potential target for DDoS. Not just for financially motivated attackers, but also for politically and ideologically driven actors looking to make a statement on the world stage “in the most-viewed country-versus-country competition.”

Streaming and broadcast platforms

Rights‑holders worldwide are on high alert. They’ve paid enormous sums for exclusive distribution rights and attackers know that knocking out a national broadcaster during a key match would cause chaos.

“You might not even need to hit the media itself,” Anstee says. “If you can’t log into your TV service, you can’t watch the match.”

Attackers increasingly target secondary vendors upstream of major services which are likely to be less defended. Anstee explains, “If I knock one of them over, what’s the downstream impact? Does it slow things down? Stop things in certain regions?”

With the World Cup spread across three countries, the supply chain is larger and more complex than ever.

Rather than directly targeting FIFA infrastructure, many attacks are expected to focus on the wider ecosystem supporting the event, including airlines, transport operators, hotels, payment systems and ticketing providers.

“All of the things that are critical to making the event a success are likely to be targeted,” Hull says. “How bad would it be if you can’t fly over to North America because one of your flights has been cancelled because of some activist activity? Or you’re over there and you can’t buy your tickets?”

Criminals are already using the World Cup as bait in phishing campaigns and fake online stores.

“We’re starting to see through some of our research phishing links being used with the World Cup as context, fake merchandise sites being spun up to buy kits.”

Automated attack

The rise of artificial intelligence has also made cyber fraud more convincing and easier to scale.

“Gone are the days of the dodgy phishing email that’s badly written,” Hull says. “AI-generated websites, deepfake videos, fraudulent betting platforms, and fake social media content could all be used to support scams or spread disinformation during the tournament.”

For consumers, the primary risks are likely to be ticket scams, fake merchandise websites and payment fraud. But Hull also warns that successful cyber attacks on infrastructure providers could create wider disruption for travellers and fans.

“It’s going to be scams essentially. Or they’re going to be losing money because they bought a dodgy ticket or they’ve purchased from a website that isn’t legitimate.”

More alarming is the rise of AI‑driven attack tools using chatbots.

“A novice can now orchestrate a complex, multi‑stage attack with a single instruction: ‘Disrupt this service tomorrow during business hours’,” Anstee says

Chatbots can automatically run reconnaissance to select the most vulnerable points of attacks. They can be programmed to launch attacks at scheduled times, monitor the ‘success’ or otherwise and adjust tactics on the fly.

Botnets like Mirai variants (a range of malware), and the AISURU botnet (reportedly the most powerful ever), and others now include millions of compromised devices. “You don’t need high‑rate traffic anymore,” Anstee explains. “If you’ve got a million and a half devices, each doing a tiny amount, you can generate enormous impact.”

Parking the bus

The role of cybersecurity specialists is to support the service providers, broadcasters, and sponsors who form the digital backbone of the tournament.

“No single layer can stop every attack,” says Anstee. “A 30‑terabit flood must be handled by the service provider, not the enterprise. But small, stealthy application‑layer attacks must be caught at the enterprise edge.

Over 540 service providers feed data to Netscout every hour, generating intelligence on 16 million attacks per year. This allows the company to identify active botnets, track attack infrastructure and feed intelligence back to customers in realtime.

Coordination is important too. For events like the World Cup, service providers, vendors, sponsors, and governments are sharing information. “It’s one of the reasons you haven’t seen major outages so far,” Anstee notes.

For major organisations involved in the tournament, Hull advises cyber preparedness should focus on “doing the basics right”, including password security, resilience testing and incident response planning. But he also stressed the importance of preparing staff for increasingly sophisticated social engineering attacks.

Hull says, “Major sporting events like this combine huge digital dependency with emotional public engagement and that creates ideal conditions for cyber-attacks and online scams.”