The Sport Thread

The scorebar in the Chelsea VS Manchester United game isn't there anymore. Wonder what's going on?

EDIT : It's back up.

Ain't they a snack?

Re: the Ireland games. Who has the Irish rights now and as such will C4 be blocked in ROI during the coverage?

RTÉ still have the Autumn Internationals, it’s their last senior men’s rugby left. (They have the final of the domestic league too, but that is a largely amateur competition).

I’ve never heard of Channel 4 being blocked on cable platforms. Certain programmes have been blocked on Sky before - but if it’s any indication, they are not blocked at the moment for the Heineken Cup coverage. Even so, it can easily be circumvented by tuning in one of the other advertising regions on Other Channels/Manual Tuning.

The BBC coverage of the Anthems on the pitch for the NFL football match at Wembley was all over the place on BBC Two. The pictures kept flicking over the CBS and the BBC pictures every few seconds. I discovered that there was a CBS NFL logo on the top hand corner of the screen when God Save the Queen was finished. It was very odd behaviour. Does that happen for every game or is that a first for the BBC? The CBS NFL graphics & commentators are in use for this game from Wembley. They have very nice shades of blue & black in use for their lower thirds.

BBC have to take the US 'match host' Pictures. In this case CBS. So the BBC get the commentators, graphics and replay wipes.
One thing I did notice, the BBC seem to have a clean feed of the match audio, as the links in/out of the game breaks are very clean with none of the ear shattering stings used by CBS to be heard anywhere.

The only time I remember the BBC having any control over the gfx was during one of their Super Bowls where they managed to slap a BBC Sport full-colour bug over the top of an NBC Sports icon.

Notice that Phillip Studd has been missing from the coverage of the English open snooker this weekend, with Neal Foulds being a lead commentator instead. Any ideas where Studd is?

They did take a clean feed of one of the London games - Jacksonville v Buffalo in 2015 - and ran their own graphics. The game in question was being shown by Yahoo! and Sky also took the game and had the CBS graphics with the Yahoo! logo removed, which looked a bit odd. The BBC never repeated the experiment - one of the biggest problems was the game clock, which I think they needed to actually point a camera at the stadium clock to get right.

The BBC do have access to their own replays at the London games (or at least clean feed versions of CBS replays) as they do use them during US commercial breaks, with their own replay wipes (just a plain NFL logo).

Presuming they get the rights if a London franchise happened or NFL Europe started back up, I guess they might try to get clean feeds then, as it would be more worthwhile to spend the money designing a full graphics package?

I wouldn’t see designing the graphics as the problem. After all you could probably adapt the rugby league package relatively easily. But aside from branding what gain do you take from having your own package on air rather than the US host broadcaster? Unless the US broadcaster was willing to provide a full data feed including access to the stadium and play clocks, and all their various stats and info that they have, then you’re just better off taking the US host broadcaster graphics, particularly if you’re taking their commentary anyway. That 2015 game was very problematic graphics wise - I’ve already mentioned the game clock issue, but I also recall lower thirds were few and far between. It was obviously a desire to avoid the Yahoo branding - as I say Sky got a version of the graphics missing the actual Yahoo logo, making the scorebar look wierd.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this.

The games are covered by the regional sports networks crews aren't they? I think someone said that. In that case it would simply make sense for the BBC to be the 'host' for the London home games, as I don't think it would be worth it for those crews to be flown over 8 times from the US, especially if the game is only being shown in local markets. My guess in this instance that the BBC would work with the broadcaster of the conference the team is in to develop a joint graphics package together. The BBC would provide the commentary in this situation too.

Same with if NFL Europe came back. How was this covered back in the day? US coverage (According to wiki they only showed two games a week over there) or was it our own crews?

EDIT: Funny you should mention the clock, watching Redzone and Cowboys@Redskins on CBS is having technical issues with the clock, which has disappeared off screen.