Punter chips in from his couch
RICKY Ponting commentated the fourth Test from his lounge room and won’t be in Hobart either … but it won’t make any difference.
Covid has changed broadcasting forever, and the huge challenges networks Fox Sports and Channel 7 have been forced to overcome this summer has proven that the impossible is possible – and the viewing experience remains unaffected.
Cricket’s annual Test summer roadshow is the biggest and most complex broadcasting operation in Australian sport, with about 60 cameras in operation and hundreds of crew and commentators going from city to city.
Sky Sports, the English cricket broadcasters, warned Fox Sports from their own chaotic experiences last year, to split up their commentary and production teams so that if infection infiltrated one team, the other would be ready to go.
That’s proven a saviour. Both Fox and Channel 7 have been impacted heavily by Covid infections, however, being forced to become creative in remote broadcasting which has not impacted on the television ratings records broken for this Ashes.
“I don’t recall life before Covid anymore. It’s a real can-do attitude in the broadcasting community, it doesn’t matter whether they’re from Fox or Seven,” Channel 7 programming boss Lewis Martin said.
“Covid has just led to all these innovations and some of those innovations will stay with us forever. The capacity to be in multiple locations and a wide range of locations.
“Ricky Ponting was commentating the fourth Test from home and nobody noticed.
“The viewer knew because we told them, but the viewing experience wasn’t impacted.”
Proving that calling BBL and football matches remotely is possible will ensure a huge cost saving for broadcasters, even when things are back to normal.
Fox Cricket boss Matt Weiss said nothing could quite prepare for the challenges of having 30 per cent of his workforce taken out during the summer.
“It’s testament to how professional the people involved are, that they’ve been able to deliver the quality of product and production that they have with the Covid restrictions that are placed on us,” Weiss said.
“Over the past two years it has made everyone pretty prepared for this situation, which is why we’ve been able to continue to deliver world-class productions.”
Cricket Australia’s head of broadcast Richard Ostroff said Test cricket broadcasting was now “on a scale and complexity that’s greater than any major sport in the country”.