Sky Sports UK Pushes Fountain Plaza Operation Further in Year Four at US Open

Now in its fourth year on site as part of a five-year deal with the USTA, Sky Sports UK has settled into a familiar groove at the US Open. The broadcaster once again has set up shop in Fountain Plaza, where it hosts daily studio shows, with a crew of roughly 40 creating content throughout the Tennis Center grounds and a fully remote production team cutting the show back home at Sky Sports’ Osterley campus in London.

“It’s year four for us, and each year we’ve pushed the benchmark and boundaries of what’s possible here [on site],” says James Thomas, tennis production manager, Sky Sports UK. “I’m really proud of how we’ve developed and tried new things each year. It’s a massive team effort from everyone involved – not just [during the tournament], but the months of pre-planning that get us to this stage. It’s a huge achievement for everyone back at Sky [in the UK] and here on the ground [in Queens].”

While the on-site footprint resembles previous years, Sky Sports UK has made a handful of technical changes under the hood: a third RF camera has been replaced by a LiveU bonded-cellular pack, the audio kit has largely been rebuilt from the ground up, and the on-site operation has migrated from fully SDI to a mix of SDI and NDI.

The main studio set, located just outside Arthur Ashe Stadium, is served by three hard cameras. Sky Sports UK also has two RF cameras and the LiveU unit roaming the site to capture the atmosphere.

“Because of the RF restrictions here — and we’re working quite closely with the USTA on that — we’ve implemented LiveU instead of a third RF,” says Thomas. “That has worked really well all around the site, even with the massive number of people out here for the US Open.

“There is a slight delay on the LiveU compared to the RF, but it hasn’t impacted us much at all, and there is a pretty significant cost benefit there,” he continues. “It’s the first true test of this technology for us and something we could look to engage with and use further down the line.”

Three hardwired fiber positions anchor the coverage — the stage, the top of Arthur Ashe Stadium, and the practice courts — with RF handling everything else.

“We’ve been pretty much everywhere,” says Thomas, citing Avenue of Aces, Court of Champions, and Grandstand, including the bar. “For our morning UK [broadcasts], the grounds are pretty quiet, so that’s the reason we try to stay as mobile as possible and find the action rather than let it come to us.”

Hawk-Eye is also on site, feeding live AR graphics and on-court analysis. Sky Sports UK produced its first on-court Hawk-Eye AR session last year and has expanded it since, with a segment planned on court ahead of Saturday’s women’s final. In addition, a PTZ camera at the stage renders Pixotope AR graphics against the New York skyline for a variety of segments during Sky Sports UK’s broadcasts.

On the transmission side, Sky is using its North America-based kit, featuring a mix of Appear, NTT, and J2K encoders that run into a pair of Net Insight Nimbra units. The feeds are sent from Flushing to Comcast cohort NBC Sports’ Stamford, CT, headquarters and across Sky’s dedicated intercontinental lines to its broadcast center in the UK, where the show is produced out of a REMI control room.

“We added the Appear [encoders] this year, and it’s made a huge difference for us,” says Darren Du Preez, senior technical supervisor, Sky Sports. “This year, we’ve been doing a lot more golf with the [North American] kit, and golf requires a lot of [transmission] lines, so Appear was the better way to do it in the smaller form factor. It’s been great for us on tennis, golf, and multiple other sports we handle here [in the U.S. and Canada].”

The fully HDR on-site operation — court feeds arrive from the host in HDR and are returned to the UK in HDR — is built around a Ross Ultrix FR5 router, and Du Preez says the workflow is increasingly built on NDI rather than SDI. Monitoring at the desk and in the commentary booth is NDI-fed, with a Riedel MediorNet Compact Pro handling a parallel all-SDI monitoring path for redundancy.

“We’re breaking out more into the NDI and fiber world now, and we’ll continue that trend going forward,” says Du Preez.

The most significant technical change this year is on the audio side. In previous years, all audio feeds were embedded as part of the video-transport scheme; this year, audio is being transported discretely.

“It’s a major change for us,” says Simon Harris, senior sound supervisor, Sky Sports. “We rebuilt our sound kit from the ground up this year.”

Audio now travels as discrete feeds across two DirectOut Prodigy frames into the Nimbra, with the mix handled in London and a Calrec RP1 on site managing the in-ear mix for talent. Embedded audio remains as a backup. The rebuild also links into Riedel Bolero for wider intercom coverage on site.

The US Open is always a marathon rather than a sprint for the Sky Sports UK team, and this year is no different. In Thomas’ case, he arrived directly from the Cincinnati Open on Aug. 20 and departs Sept. 16 — more than a month on the road.

“We’ve got to make sure we’re looking after our crew when everyone’s away from home for a long period like this,” he says. “There’s great camaraderie, but making sure everyone is taken care of is a very important piece for us at Sky. But this is definitely our biggest [on-site] show of the year for tennis, so it’s always a highlight for us.”