Homemade tech, remote production and Tesco deliveries… how BT Sport brought the Bundesliga back

As sports properties globally begin to return from their coronavirus-enforced suspensions, the focus was always going to fall sharpest on the one resuming play first.

The biggest to comeback so far, at least in Europe, has been German soccer’s top-flight Bundesliga, which resumed in front of empty stands on 16th May. With rights holders of national leagues beholden to governments of the countries in which they are based, the Bundesliga can count itself fortunate to be in Germany. Along with South Korea and New Zealand, Germany’s success in tackling Covid-19 has been held up as an example to others, but the Bundesliga has been aiming to be more than a domestic product for a number of years. Despite having the ability to put on games safely, there was still a risk attached for its international broadcast partners airing the games live given the various forms of lockdown in place globally.

In the UK, BT Sport is the German Football League’s (DFL) sole broadcast partner for the Bundesliga, and with no other live soccer on show, the pay-TV network wanted to produce the best coverage available whilst adhering to social distancing regulations.

BT Sport hugely scaled back its production team at its base in Stratford, East London for the return of the Bundesliga and actively wanted its coverage to reflect the reality facing its viewers. A small studio team was supplemented with pundits and commentators at home, with the back end staff all mostly working remotely.

Erling Haaland is interviewed at a social distance after Borussia Dortmund's win over Schalke

“We’re not a news broadcaster, we’re a sports broadcaster, so we should be working very hard to create output with empathy, reflecting how our audience’s situation is at the time,” BT Sport chief operating officer Jamie Hindhaugh said of the production.

The ratings, as previously reported, were very strong. Borussia Dortmund’s 4-0 win over Schalke peaked at 652,000 – figures on par with a live Premier League broadcast – and significantly outstripped any previous UK viewership for the Bundesliga. In total, 1.4 million viewers took in BT Sport’s coverage of the Revierderby across its linear and over-the-top (OTT) platforms.

That does not happen by accident. Since the suspension of live sport and the lockdown in the UK, BT Sport has continued to air several live shows a week and those became a bit of a testbed for its Bundesliga broadcasts.

The Greatest Race, a four-hour MotoGP archive programme that BT Sport runs as live featuring full re-runs of historic Grands Prix, allowed it to test various bits of remote technology – as did the Rugby Tonight studio show.

Hindhaugh also stressed the value of partners such as Timeline and Telegenic working with the broadcaster’s chief engineer Andy Beal to introduce solutions that did not exist prior to lockdown.

“Dan McDonald, the MD at Timeline, was sending me pictures from his living room of an evening when he’d been able to get an EVS to operate remotely,” Hindhaugh points out.

To learn how BT Sport pulled off its big return to action, SportsPro spoke at length with Hindhaugh about the challenges of such a drastically different production and the strategic planning required to pull it off.

How different was that first Bundesliga broadcast back from your normal approach?

We had a studio presentation with James Richardson and Rafa [Honigstein], then Owen Hargreaves joining in, and that is about where it stopped from our traditional coverage. The whole studio operation was done from people’s homes – they were driving the gallery [remotely]. 

That was to enforce social distancing but also to make sure that people weren’t travelling unnecessarily. Then we went to the live game and Paul Dempsey was in his loft in Dublin commentating with Steve McManaman in Manchester co-commentating from his home. To do that all in a live setting is pretty phenomenal.

Games two and three we had a gallery and a box. So we had a producer-director at home with a system, and a partner who is a technical multi-skilled opetative. So that’s two people, plus a commentator from their home, producing the whole coverage for each of those games. When you combine five concurrent games we would normally have between 50 and 70 people on site and we had less than ten. People working from and being in sync, it’s pretty clever stuff.

When you start looking at the longer term possibilities around sustainability, around inclusion, around creativity – it’s a game changer. I’m proud that we had the support for what was a massive weekend for us being the only place with live football.

How did you manage to pull it off with social distancing in place?

It has been two months in the planning. We had already gone public [in September 2019] with the strategy to try and take a lot of our production workflows remote. What that meant at the time was remote as in centralising your back end operation, so reducing the amount that people had to travel and what we thought meant being able to do it all from Stratford.

When this kicked in we realised that we shouldn’t be using Stratford in the same way. We’d normally have between 200 and 400 people on site depending what was on our channels. We’re now operating all of BT Sport, creating content and doing live, with one shift on site.

We’ve enabled in the last six to eight weeks for everybody to work remotely, whether that is editing content, searching for content in the archive, doing commentary, doing presentation, scheduling our channels, digital output, complying content, everything is done remotely from people’s homes.

Given the importance of the Bundesliga as the first major soccer league to return, did those plans have to be amended?

When the Bundesliga looked like it was coming – and we were never sure whether it would happen or not – we actually finalised our final plans for how we could do this [on 11th May] . Basically it was taking all of those building blocks and asking, ‘how do we treat this game?’, because of the scale of the relaunch and because we could practice social distancing and run our studios remotely we decided that a studio show was the right decision.

James Richardson [as host] was an inspired choice for his football knowledge and knowledge of the Bundesliga. I think Rafa’s proximity to the Bundesliga is fantastic, Owen Hargreaves coming in remotely – still giving us that ‘at home’ element – having played in that league was also really vital.

We were able to look at that, then look at how we do these other games and the system we used for doing galleries in a box from home that we’d previously trialled in other programming such as Rugby Tonight. As we’d been stress testing these different elements, we felt it was important to deliver the quality expected and give justice to the fact this was live football – we still showed the 5.30pm kick off in 4K as well.

We knew that maybe people wouldn’t naturally watch the Bundesliga but we knew it was a good league, we’ve worked with it since our inception, but there would be more interest. We wanted it to look and feel like BT Sport but we wanted to be very clear that we are treating our own team’s safety as a key priority and using innovation to give our audiences what they want.

Do you think you can retain those new Bundesliga viewers?  

BT Sport saw record ratings for a Bundesliga broadcast when the league restarted 16th May

The Bundesliga has a big fanbase in the UK, there is a strong core element. There are English players out there. We told the [Jaydon] Sancho story before the first live game.

If you looked on social media that’s been very interesting in helping people adopt a team. For some people seeing competitive live football come back is great, it’s a great escape, and helps to bring a sense of normality. People will be adopting a team and getting their fix of football.

The Bundesliga from a quality perspective is really good and there were some great games on the [first] weekend [back]. So I think some people will have an initial intrigue to see what football’s like behind closed doors but actually people will see the quality [and remain interested].

It’s amazing how you adapt very quickly to different ways of watching, because that’s the new normal. Look at all the programming out there now and people accept pixellating, guests dropping in and out. So I do think we’ll see people sticking around with the Bundesliga.

So you have commentators in different countries, how does that come together?

You give the commentator the same feed as what is going into the gallery – that is very similar to how it works now. If a commentator is not at a game now they’re in Stratford in a booth and they see the same feed that is going into the gallery. You sync the commentator to the feed – which is hardly any delay, if any, that’s exactly what happens in Stratford – then you TX it live.

So we used that same system, but you can access it via a remote broadband connection rather than being in a physical space. There was a challenge with co-comms as normally they’d sit next to each other – either at the event or in a booth. With the best will in the world you couldn’t have them both in a booth now because social distancing means they can’t be in the same room. So we gave them talkback and monitors so they could see each other.

Different co-comms and commentators have different styles – to be blunt it’s all about that discussion beforehand about signalling and being able to still give that look. I think it worked really well.

I was following on social media and people seemed to be genuinely surprised they weren’t at the event, let alone in the studio.

What was the biggest technical challenge?

The gallery in the box wasn’t simple. Normally for something like this where you get your world feed in and you add your graphics, your comms, highlights and put the breaks in, you normally have four people in a structure. We brought in a system where we only used two people and that will probably go down to one. That’s a whole new way of working – the big challenge is cultural. There was a wonderful moment where Paul Dempsey remarked live on air he had a Tesco’s delivery. It’s those little [moments] that you realise, these guys are used to working by being at the event or being in a broadcast infrastructure setting.

I find it very interesting that most outside broadcasts where you have trucks, the director and the crew are in the car park. They’re still using talkback, they’re still not actually inside the stadium per se. Yet there was always a real reluctance within the industry to not be there, whereas all remote production is doing is extending the broadband connectivity between that truck and the stadium.

What lessons did you learn from that broadcast?

What you learn from the success of it are things like: ‘why on earth would you bring a commentator into a booth in Stratford when they can do it from home?’ Some big events – when I say big I mean in the UK and with a crowd there – you may still want one or both your commentators at the ground. What I love about this is that it starts checking some of those givens that have been in place just because they are.

All our commentators, our on-screen colleagues, all really enjoyed being part of it. That was partly the excitement of having the Bundesliga back, but also, ‘yes, we’re really doing something different here’. Also, we’re doing it for the right reasons, not just to be clever, but to protect our teams, our infrastructure, and show our audiences what they want.

If you want this to be the long term then people have got to enjoy what they’re doing and see it as a benefit. Otherwise – and I don’t want this – whenever we get back to whatever normal is, people just revert to type. [There is] too much opportunity in this to change how we impact our planet, for want of a better way of putting it.

Jamie Hindhaugh is speaking at the SportsPro Insider Series OTT and Broadcast event on 11th June. To gain access to his session and more, register here.

As sports properties globally begin to return from their coronavirus-enforced suspensions, the focus was always going to fall sharpest on the one resuming play first.

The biggest to comeback so far, at least in Europe, has been German soccer’s top-flight Bundesliga, which resumed in front of empty stands on 16th May. With rights holders of national leagues beholden to governments of the countries in which they are based, the Bundesliga can count itself fortunate to be in Germany. Along with South Korea and New Zealand, Germany’s success in tackling Covid-19 has been held up as an example to others, but the Bundesliga has been aiming to be more than a domestic product for a number of years. Despite having the ability to put on games safely, there was still a risk attached for its international broadcast partners airing the games live given the various forms of lockdown in place globally.

In the UK, BT Sport is the German Football League’s (DFL) sole broadcast partner for the Bundesliga, and with no other live soccer on show, the pay-TV network wanted to produce the best coverage available whilst adhering to social distancing regulations.

BT Sport hugely scaled back its production team at its base in Stratford, East London for the return of the Bundesliga and actively wanted its coverage to reflect the reality facing its viewers. A small studio team was supplemented with pundits and commentators at home, with the back end staff all mostly working remotely.

“We’re not a news broadcaster, we’re a sports broadcaster, so we should be working very hard to create output with empathy, reflecting how our audience’s situation is at the time,” BT Sport chief operating officer Jamie Hindhaugh said of the production.

The ratings, as previously reported, were very strong. Borussia Dortmund’s 4-0 win over Schalke peaked at 652,000 – figures on par with a live Premier League broadcast – and significantly outstripped any previous UK viewership for the Bundesliga. In total, 1.4 million viewers took in BT Sport’s coverage of the Revierderby across its linear and over-the-top (OTT) platforms.

That does not happen by accident. Since the suspension of live sport and the lockdown in the UK, BT Sport has continued to air several live shows a week and those became a bit of a testbed for its Bundesliga broadcasts.

The Greatest Race, a four-hour MotoGP archive programme that BT Sport runs as live featuring full re-runs of historic Grands Prix, allowed it to test various bits of remote technology – as did the Rugby Tonight studio show.

Hindhaugh also stressed the value of partners such as Timeline and Telegenic working with the broadcaster’s chief engineer Andy Beal to introduce solutions that did not exist prior to lockdown.

“Dan McDonald, the MD at Timeline, was sending me pictures from his living room of an evening when he’d been able to get an EVS to operate remotely,” Hindhaugh points out.

To learn how BT Sport pulled off its big return to action, SportsPro spoke at length with Hindhaugh about the challenges of such a drastically different production and the strategic planning required to pull it off.

How different was that first Bundesliga broadcast back from your normal approach?

We had a studio presentation with James Richardson and Rafa [Honigstein], then Owen Hargreaves joining in, and that is about where it stopped from our traditional coverage. The whole studio operation was done from people’s homes – they were driving the gallery [remotely]. 

That was to enforce social distancing but also to make sure that people weren’t travelling unnecessarily. Then we went to the live game and Paul Dempsey was in his loft in Dublin commentating with Steve McManaman in Manchester co-commentating from his home. To do that all in a live setting is pretty phenomenal.

Games two and three we had a gallery and a box. So we had a producer-director at home with a system, and a partner who is a technical multi-skilled opetative. So that’s two people, plus a commentator from their home, producing the whole coverage for each of those games. When you combine five concurrent games we would normally have between 50 and 70 people on site and we had less than ten. People working from and being in sync, it’s pretty clever stuff.

When you start looking at the longer term possibilities around sustainability, around inclusion, around creativity – it’s a game changer. I’m proud that we had the support for what was a massive weekend for us being the only place with live football.

How did you manage to pull it off with social distancing in place?

It has been two months in the planning. We had already gone public [in September 2019] with the strategy to try and take a lot of our production workflows remote. What that meant at the time was remote as in centralising your back end operation, so reducing the amount that people had to travel and what we thought meant being able to do it all from Stratford.

When this kicked in we realised that we shouldn’t be using Stratford in the same way. We’d normally have between 200 and 400 people on site depending what was on our channels. We’re now operating all of BT Sport, creating content and doing live, with one shift on site.

We’ve enabled in the last six to eight weeks for everybody to work remotely, whether that is editing content, searching for content in the archive, doing commentary, doing presentation, scheduling our channels, digital output, complying content, everything is done remotely from people’s homes.

Given the importance of the Bundesliga as the first major soccer league to return, did those plans have to be amended?

When the Bundesliga looked like it was coming – and we were never sure whether it would happen or not – we actually finalised our final plans for how we could do this [on 11th May] . Basically it was taking all of those building blocks and asking, ‘how do we treat this game?’, because of the scale of the relaunch and because we could practice social distancing and run our studios remotely we decided that a studio show was the right decision.

James Richardson [as host] was an inspired choice for his football knowledge and knowledge of the Bundesliga. I think Rafa’s proximity to the Bundesliga is fantastic, Owen Hargreaves coming in remotely – still giving us that ‘at home’ element – having played in that league was also really vital.

We were able to look at that, then look at how we do these other games and the system we used for doing galleries in a box from home that we’d previously trialled in other programming such as Rugby Tonight. As we’d been stress testing these different elements, we felt it was important to deliver the quality expected and give justice to the fact this was live football – we still showed the 5.30pm kick off in 4K as well.

We knew that maybe people wouldn’t naturally watch the Bundesliga but we knew it was a good league, we’ve worked with it since our inception, but there would be more interest. We wanted it to look and feel like BT Sport but we wanted to be very clear that we are treating our own team’s safety as a key priority and using innovation to give our audiences what they want.

Do you think you can retain those new Bundesliga viewers?  

The Bundesliga has a big fanbase in the UK, there is a strong core element. There are English players out there. We told the [Jaydon] Sancho story before the first live game.

If you looked on social media that’s been very interesting in helping people adopt a team. For some people seeing competitive live football come back is great, it’s a great escape, and helps to bring a sense of normality. People will be adopting a team and getting their fix of football.

The Bundesliga from a quality perspective is really good and there were some great games on the [first] weekend [back]. So I think some people will have an initial intrigue to see what football’s like behind closed doors but actually people will see the quality [and remain interested].

It’s amazing how you adapt very quickly to different ways of watching, because that’s the new normal. Look at all the programming out there now and people accept pixellating, guests dropping in and out. So I do think we’ll see people sticking around with the Bundesliga.

So you have commentators in different countries, how does that come together?

You give the commentator the same feed as what is going into the gallery – that is very similar to how it works now. If a commentator is not at a game now they’re in Stratford in a booth and they see the same feed that is going into the gallery. You sync the commentator to the feed – which is hardly any delay, if any, that’s exactly what happens in Stratford – then you TX it live. So we used that same system, but you can access it via a remote broadband connection rather than being in a physical space. There was a challenge with co-comms as normally they’d sit next to each other – either at the event or in a booth. With the best will in the world you couldn’t have them both in a booth now because social distancing means they can’t be in the same room. So we gave them talkback and monitors so they could see each other.

Different co-comms and commentators have different styles – to be blunt it’s all about that discussion beforehand about signalling and being able to still give that look. I think it worked really well.

I was following on social media and people seemed to be genuinely surprised they weren’t at the event, let alone in the studio.

What was the biggest technical challenge?

The gallery in the box wasn’t simple. Normally for something like this where you get your world feed in and you add your graphics, your comms, highlights and put the breaks in, you normally have four people in a structure. We brought in a system where we only used two people and that will probably go down to one. That’s a whole new way of working – the big challenge is cultural. There was a wonderful moment where Paul Dempsey remarked live on air he had a Tesco’s delivery. It’s those little [moments] that you realise, these guys are used to working by being at the event or being in a broadcast infrastructure setting.

I find it very interesting that most outside broadcasts where you have trucks, the director and the crew are in the car park. They’re still using talkback, they’re still not actually inside the stadium per se. Yet there was always a real reluctance within the industry to not be there, whereas all remote production is doing is extending the broadband connectivity between that truck and the stadium.

What lessons did you learn from that broadcast?

What you learn from the success of it are things like: ‘why on earth would you bring a commentator into a booth in Stratford when they can do it from home?’ Some big events – when I say big I mean in the UK and with a crowd there – you may still want one or both your commentators at the ground. What I love about this is that it starts checking some of those givens that have been in place just because they are.

All our commentators, our on-screen colleagues, all really enjoyed being part of it. That was partly the excitement of having the Bundesliga back, but also, ‘yes, we’re really doing something different here’. Also, we’re doing it for the right reasons, not just to be clever, but to protect our teams, our infrastructure, and show our audiences what they want.

If you want this to be the long term then people have got to enjoy what they’re doing and see it as a benefit. Otherwise – and I don’t want this – whenever we get back to whatever normal is, people just revert to type. [There is] too much opportunity in this to change how we impact our planet, for want of a better way of putting it.