DEEP DIVE

Placey: Cameras get talked about a lot and the high-speeds are wonderful. You can’t put enough of them on a game, in my view. But what you’ve seen industry wide is advancement in audio. Not necessarily the technical advancement, but the trust from the leagues. Major League Baseball, allowing us to put microphones on players in game. It’s a wonderful development that isn’t really new technology. It’s a new production approach. The hard work that we do is really earning the trust and we count on our colleagues from our network and from other networks to continue to reinforce that if you trust us, we’ll do good things with the access you allow us. We’re in this together.

On ESPN projects that approached the more bleeding edge: Lopes: The euphoria around NFTs has died down a bit but probably the most fun deal I’ve done in the last year was negotiating the first NFT deal for ESPN. We did a partnership with Tom Brady and a company called Autograph and we offered it in the DraftKings Marketplace. Doing something that the company’s never done before was just wildly exciting. Some of the other things my team works on day-to-day are AR, VR, automation, automated close captioning, AI-generated highlights. Basically, anything new, next, and cool, my team gets to work on.

Brzezinski-Hsu: We’ve done a lot more work in Unreal Engine and you’ll see it anywhere from the live events in openings for NBA Finals games or in custom animations that we do on Monday Night Football. We’re using Unreal to tell a story and use photorealism to do things in real time. It even blows the minds of our partners at Pixar when we tell them that storylines are starting to reveal themselves before next week’s Monday Night Football game and we’re able to create an animation within those five or six days, be able to render very quickly, and tell a story which really helps us be relevant day of.