ESPN and the SEC’s launch of the latest in broadcasting technology will allow championship gymnastics competitions to be properly streamed live as they happen.
The latest innovations are a culmination of experiences from streaming regular-season competitions. Meg Aronowitz, ESPN Coordinating Producer, credits their latest breakthrough to new graphics that allows for up-to-the-minute scoring during these events.
“We’ve learned a great deal televising regular-season gymnastics live for the past two-years, and have seen some incredible opportunities for growth of the sport on television. The biggest hurdle in producing the sport live – and specifically the SEC Championship – is scoring, and we believe the graphics interface we’ve developed makes that challenge obsolete,” Aronowitz said.
The success didn’t come without a complete overhaul of their broadcast structure. The new graphics and laid out in a way that demanded a top-to-bottom redesign of the interface, according to ESPN Associate Director of Visual Technology Will Gairing.
“It all had to be redone, the scripting and the database calls for all that had to be rebuilt for the look, all the real time graphics had to be rebuilt and tested and run through the QA facets. It was a big process to get it done and we did it all in a month,” Gairing said.
Although keeping scores presented a challenge in itself, keeping up with all the schools as they competed only added to the feat. ESPN debuted the new casting format during the 2016 SEC Gymnastics Championship, a quad-style meet, meaning multiple competitors performed their routines at the same time on different mats. The format of these competitions previously made simultaneous tracking of both the competitors and their scores difficult to translate on one screen, but not so much anymore.
“In order to produce a quad-style meet live we had to go back to the drawing board with the scoring interface we built for gymnastics in 2014. The basic concept is the same, only expanded to showcase four scores in real-time. We decided to roll out an entirely new graphics look along with the boxscore expansion, and the team developed new animations to illuminate scoring alerts,” Aronowitz said.
Teams working on the latest changes had to adapt the format they used from regular meets, which are usually dual meets, to accommodate the championship’s structure. The latest scoring system is intended to give viewers more context to the competitions since multiple teams can receive their scores at different times throughout an event.
“People that watch gymnastics for the first time get really confused on how scores are tabulated, why scores are dropped, what’s happening. Sometimes, you’re watching a gymnastics meet, and you think ‘Florida is the clear winner,’ and then it comes down to a tenth of a point at the end of the fourth rotation, and you don’t understand the math. It’s really important to make sure that we’re educating (viewers) and keeping them updated on what’s happening from a scoring standpoint,” Aronowitz said.
Viewers could take full advantage of the latest trend online, with ESPN’s web streaming service, WatchESPN (or ESPN3), which allows fans to switch between all five streaming apparatuses. The SEC Network +, however, offered a peak of the “All-Around” multi-view technology when it broadcasted the championship.
In the future, the “worldwide leader in sports” hopes to use the technology to give viewers the opportunity to mold their experience the way they want.
“Our goal is to give the fan of a particular team a second screen experience, allowing them to customize their view. Fans can stream their preferred gymnasts’ routines live on another device while watching the coverage of the overall meet on their television,” Aronowitz said.
Gairing notes that the new technology being used to improve the viewing quality for gymnastics events might have a place in other programs that ESPN produces . Ideas currently in the air could see the new format molded to enhance sports broadcasts that cover spelling bees and hot dog eating contests.
“We’re just investigating now, but we might be able to pull something off (in spelling bees),” Gairing said. “We’re definitely going to do some stuff on the digital side, maybe not using the score pads in similar use, but in a different fashion; when people are spelling words correctly or incorrectly, we can create a real time track of that now.”
