Media
Covering a fanless event
UFC’s Craig Borsari gives his take on how TV can make it work.
The UFC looked for opportunities to enhance its production from Jacksonville.getty images
As leagues prepare to play games in empty arenas and stadiums, TV producers have spent weeks studying how networks have handled these types of games in the past.
There was a baseball game in Baltimore. A Serie A match in Italy. A college basketball game in Atlanta.
Now, there has also been a UFC event in Jacksonville. The TV production business kept close tabs on the UFC’s May 9 event. I asked the UFC’s executive vice president of operations and production, Craig Borsari, what advice he has for producers preparing for their own fanless events.
Borsari:
“On the front end, you need to be incredibly mindful of the situation the entire world is in. You have to be diligent about the testing and the protocol it takes to make sure that everybody is confident and comfortable and safe leading into the broadcast.
Having that confidence in the crew and everybody involved is imperative. If you have people who are uneasy, you’re not going to have a good broadcast.
Then it’s looking at your individual sport and identifying opportunities to enhance your broadcast. For us, it was audio. For NASCAR, that may not be the case. They already have incredible audio. It may be camera positions that they can put in certain locations that they weren’t able to use when there were 80,000 fans in the stands.
It’s looking at it from a fresh perspective. We were able to do our preshow from a different location because we didn’t have what we call seat kills where we would put the desk and have to kill seats. We had the flexibility to put our desk in any position we wanted.
As different leagues and different rights holders look at the way to produce different sports, look to seek out those opportunities where you actually have a potential advantage to do something you haven’t been able to do before.”
