NASCAR isn’t usually associated with the Emmy Awards. But this weekend, the league will receive an Emmy for its off-site broadcast production capabilities. And broadcast technology is powering a broad shift at the league worth noting.
NASCAR Productions will be recognized in the category of Large-Scale “At Home” Production for live sports at the 70th Annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards taking place on Sunday in Las Vegas at the National Association of Broadcasters Show. The Big Ten Network and PSSI Global Services are also being recognized.
For the racing league, the recognition signals efforts to leverage sophisticated technological infrastructure. NASCAR no longer wants to produce live event coverage from the track, but from an in-house studio at its headquarters in Charlotte, N.C.
This season, all 12 IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship events, nine or 10 NASCAR XFINITY Series and NASCAR Gander Outdoors Truck Series events and various races across key NASCAR regional and development series, including NASCAR K&N Pro Series, the NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour, and the ARCA Menards Series, will be produced this way.
These events will air across FOX, NBC, NBCSN and FS1, NASCAR’s primary broadcast partners. While this method of production has yet to make its way to the premier Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series, Steve Stum, NASCAR Productions’ vice president of operations and technical production, said the is goal to migrate even the most elite NASCAR events to off-site production in the near future.
Cost savings have fueled much of this effort. A third of NASCAR Production’s overall budget goes to travel. Reducing that with a more efficient process means reinvesting in better fan experiences. The league has already experimented with new content formats, such as 360 video and point-of-view car cameras.
“NASCAR is probably one of the hardest sports to cover because of the size and complexity of it,” Stum said. “We have cable runs that are two miles long. It’s just a massive amount of people that have to go out and travel every week. If we reinvest to make our technology and programming better, it helps all of us out.”
Prior to this shift at the league, most productions of live events took place on site. NASCAR would fly out dozens of people each week to man its cameras, audio, and infrastructure setup. It’d fly out the entire production staff, responsible for clipping the show together and managing talent. While the league still needs a handful of people on site for setup and audio, it has been able to reduce its traveling production crew by two thirds over the past year or two, from as many as 75 previously to 25 currently.
At the core of the changes have been fiber optics, satellites, and encoding gear from Ericsson that have enabled the league to send large video feeds from some 32 on-site cameras placed around the track and inside race cars, as well as content from 150 audio feeds, to Charlotte within milliseconds. While other leagues have experimented with off-site production capabilities, Stum said he believes NASCAR was recognized because of the sheer scale of its operations. The league produces dozens of shows this way, covering live events that span several hours—or in the case of 24 Hours of Daytona, an entire day—with cars speeding around a two-mile track that sometimes winds in and out view.
NASCAR envisions all of this content feeding into the over-the-top streaming platform FansChoice.TV. The platform currently hosts content from its smaller events, but the league will likely lean on it more heavily in the coming years as it works to host coverage of all the hundreds of events it hosts each year. This will enable the organization to better cover and promote development leagues, with a goal of further entrenching fans into its ecosystem with richer stories about the racing format and its athletes. Covering smaller regional events was previously cost prohibitive compared with the return on investment.
“Jimmy Johnson, Kyle Busch, Ryan Blaney, Bubba Wallace: they all started at that grassroots level. That’s where our stars of tomorrow come from,” Stum said. “Using our facility here to produce those races, we’ll be able to promote those grassroots races where many of our guys start out.”
Beyond just production, NASCAR is leveraging efficient video technology to fundamentally shift other aspects of race operations. Beginning this season with 18 lower-tier races, the league will experiment with keeping race officials at home in Charlotte.
In recent years, the league has already reduced the amount of officials required at each race down from 43. NASCAR’s adoption of artificial intelligence scans pit stops and automatically selects possible infractions for review by humans. Today, eight officials sit inside a high-tech, on-site trailer watching screens that show randomized pit stops at double speed. Another 10 officials stand down at pit road in fire suits watching the cars in person.
With the infrastructure it is building for off-site production capabilities, NASCAR is hoping to bring home as many of those remaining officials as it can.
In theory, NASCAR is developing a large-scale cost-reduction scheme. Financial flexibility will help it to focus on what matters—acquiring new fans and engaging existing fans with new content and experiences—as it vies against rival sports for attention.