NEW YORK — Super Bowl LIII isn’t for another 17 months but with its host venue now operational — the ultra-modern Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta — CBS Sports is already preparing its broadcast with its first site visit next week. Executive producer Harold Bryant said his crew will start scouting studio set locations and camera placements and, more generally, plans to use the coming season to invite innovation in advance of game day on Feb. 3, 2019.
“The big thing for us this year,” Bryant told SportTechie, “we’ve reached out to all of these providers of technology to say ‘Hey, let’s test, let’s experiment, let’s try.’”
For its last Super Bowl broadcast in 2016, CBS debuted cameras embedded into the end zone pylons and the EyeVision 360 replay system, a set of 36 cameras providing periscopic replay views, for which the broadcast network won that year’s Technical Achievement Award at the Emmy’s. Intel later bought Replay Technologies, the startup that provided the 360 views and rebranded the system as Intel freeD; that technology is already installed in Baltimore, Houston and San Francisco with expansion plans to several new stadiums in the works. Bryant said CBS is working with Intel to use that technology “on selected games” this fall.
One additional visible change implemented for this season are an upgrade in camera technology to 4K for Thursday night games and most lead national broadcasts on Sunday afternoons. “We continue to push the high-speed landscape,” Bryant said.
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Otherwise, CBS Sports has focused on changes “under the hood,” Bryant said. The underlying platform producing on-screen graphics has switched from Vizrt to ChyronDuet with Lyric software to create texture such as storyline graphics, full-screens and lower-thirds. Sports Media Technology will provide score tracking and real-time stats. Bryant said his team continues to emphasize speed in display complementary statistics to enhance the context of the analysts’ comments.
Bryant, a 20-year veteran of the network, said CBS continues to experiment with virtual reality — which it has used on college basketball Final Four broadcasts — but isn’t ready to fully embrace the technology yet.
“I still think the live VR has some steps to improve,” he said, adding, “You want to sit down and watch a game on your big-screen TV and not have to get on a device or move something around. You want media to come at you and not have to work so hard for it. It’s getting there.”
After all, for all the advances in production and new methods of consumption via streaming, CBS doesn’t want technology to cloud the primary product anytime from Week 1 to Super Bowl 53.
“That’s what football is, action and storytelling,” Bryant said. “And we continue to be, I think, one of the best at it.”