DEEP DIVE

Grant on taking over as director for the 2023 NCAA Final Four broadcasts and how technology will play a role in the coverage:

Grant: For a long time, I’d go to bed and dream about someday getting all those exciting tools on some of the events that I get to work. CBS has now asked me to direct the Final Four, so I will get my chance to do it. I’m very excited to finally be able to use those tools, but I want to make sure I don’t overuse them. When you get a new toy at Christmastime, you play with it a lot and tend to overuse it; I don’t want to do that. I want to take advantage of the technology and use it in ways to [enhance what] viewers are seeing, but I don’t want to fall in love with [the tools] and overdo it.

On how CBS Sports used properties like SRX Racing (prior to its moving to ESPN in 2023) to experiment and innovate live-production technologies:

Cohen: SRX Racing has been a hotbed of technology that we’ve always been able — whether [having] multiple cameras on cars, or drones with AR, or AR in the car and the booth. It was a great opportunity for us to test all those technologies so we could apply them to other sports. All these technologies are applicable to other sports; it’s just a matter of having the opportunity to test them. SRX provided us the opportunity to start from scratch and throw everything at the wall that we’ve ever wanted to try. Those opportunities are few and far between, so when you get them, you have to take them.

On making high-end technologies usually reserved for A games available to B- and C- level broadcasts:

Grant: I do one of the C-level NFL games every week, and it can be hard because Thursday Night Football, Sunday Night Football, our A game, Fox’s A game, or Monday Night Football are loaded and have a lot of technology. I think sometimes that technology works against the C games because we are being compared with those A-level games [by viewers]. But I can’t bring the quarterback on the field with my shallow–depthof-field camera because I don’t have one. Hopefully, it will reach a point where it’s cost-effective enough that we can share these tools with all of our games so there’s not such a disparity between the way the games look.

Francis: To the vendor’s credit, a super-slow-motion camera was a pure specialty camera not terribly long ago. Now it’s essentially flipping a switch, and almost any camera can be super-slow-motion [with the correct license]. I think we maybe had one or two slo-mos on C games when I started [at CBS], and we now have multiple angles every week on every show. There has been progress there, and I hope that can continue.

On the ongoing technical challenges for AR, and how it could evolve in the future:

Cohen: I think AR is not as much of a science project as it was 10 years ago. It’s still not perfect, by any means. I think we’re at the point where we don’t trust it completely and still take a deep breath before we have to use it, which is a problem. But, when it works, it works really well and is a true difference-maker.

Francis: When it works perfectly, we love it. But one of the bigger challenges is integrating the tracking, graphics, and cameras and getting everything working together and synchronized. I know all the vendors are out there figuring that out. Ideally, much like super-slow-motion is today, where we flip the switch on a camera, in the future, we’ll execute AR by flipping the switch on the graphics machines and the cameras. Hopefully, that’s where it’s all heading. I hope it will not just be for marquee events but will be something we could execute across all our properties.

On why the 2022 ‘NickMas’ NFL game produced by CBS Sports and Nickelodeon was the best vehicle to showcase AR:

Cohen: The Nickelodeon [NFL game] is the perfect example of AR at its best-case use. AR is always great when it works on a regular game and you’ve got a giant screen hanging above the stadium, but to enhance a broadcast and bring characters to life and bring a show to life for the Nickelodeon audience is probably the best use case when it comes making AR help elevate a show. It’s a huge step forward in AR technology. On the state of UHD and HDR production and CBS Sports’ future plans: Power: From a sports perspective, we feel pretty strongly about it. There are certainly challenges with the distribution part. There are lots of internal discussions and lots of testing, but we know, from a production and operations standpoint, that we can do it. We have been doing it, so it’s nothing new for us. But it’s very important and a priority, and we’re pushing it internally as much as we can.

Francis: What we’ve learned most recently is that, when we’ve done these test shows, AR is no longer the science project it once was. Sure, we give ourselves a little bit of extra time to get the engineering side flipped over and formatted correctly. But we’ve been able to produce our shows without any production sacrifices — super-slow-motion cameras are finally there now, and the graphics are getting there. It’s no longer a major technical challenge on the acquisition side. Certainly, nuance and some expertise are required, especially in video shading, but we’re ready and just waiting for a green light. We hope to flip the entire production in the coming years.

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