When CBS Sports executive producer Harold Bryant first walked into the broadcast booth in Atlanta’s new Mercedes-Benz Stadium last year, he wasn’t sure where he was. The space was so expansive.
“Whoa, is this a TV booth?” he recalled saying, before adding: “It was enormous. Normally space is at a premium in stadiums, and they want to save the 50-yard line seats for suites and paying customers. Sometimes they cut corners on the TV booth, but they didn’t on this one.”
Bryant has made six trips to the host venue of Super Bowl LIII, the 20th that CBS will air. On three of those journeys he brought with him the whole operations crew, on the other three he traveled with a smaller delegation Bryant expects to travel to the site three or four more times before game day on Feb. 3, 2019, as his team prepares for American television’s most-watched broadcast of the year.
Bryant made an open call for technology providers a year ago, hoping to use the 2017 season as a testing laboratory in advance of the higher stakes of CBS’ 2018 Super Bowl season. (The broadcasting rights for the game rotate between CBS, Fox, and NBC.) CBS hasn’t yet finalized its plans for the broadcast, but Bryant indicated that his network would likely use a dual SkyCam setup and include officiating expert Gene Steratore in the booth.
The tech-laden Mercedes-Benz Stadium opens up a lot of opportunity for a broadcast team. The stadium won the SportTechie Award for Most Innovative Venue last year and, unlike older venues, has much of the infrastructure in place for CBS to do more.
“New stadiums just make the setup better. They’re wired better, ready for the technology,” said Bryant, also a SVP for production at CBS Sports. “Once you get the base in place, then you can make sure all the new toys and gadgets are working.”
Bryant said he’s going to look into placing cameras “in places that you wouldn’t normally put cameras,” including up high in the stadium’s overhead, circular videoboard. For both the Super Bowl and the season, he added that CBS is exploring additional augmented and virtual reality tools for video and graphics, at least in pregame coverage.
“We’re in a golden age because [technology] continues to get better,” Bryant said. “Every year, there’s a new level of high-speed camera or better quality audio or some type of enhanced replay device.”