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‘It’s not going to get any bigger than this’: Fox Sports looks to the NFL for inspiration this cricket season
This cricket season, Fox Sports will be unleashing a host of new tech innovations only seen before in US sports broadcasts, with a world class team to commentate all the action. As Fox Sports managing director, Steve Crawley, tells Mumbrella, "it's very different now to what it was ten years ago".
The Emperor. It sounds like the lofty nickname of a cricketing legend, but it’s actually a 600 frame-per-second ultra motion camera, tasked with tracking the ball, players, and providing the footage used in swift, sweeping replays during Kayo Sport’s upcoming summer of cricket with agonising detail.
The Emperor is a team player, though, linking with AI-driven cloud-based data and technology platform HyperLayer, which uses six cameras tracking at 250 frames per second to “capture every phase of the ball’s journey – from bowler to pitch to batter,” as Kayo announced at its summer of cricket launch in Melbourne’s Federation Square on Tuesday.
With around 540 deliveries during each day of Test cricket, 810,000 frames of data are produced daily, which HyperLayer can then mesh with current season and historical data to provide AI-driven analytical data and be used to make game play predictions.
This season, 4D replays will be seen during Kayo Sport’s cricket coverage – a first for Australian sport. Major League Baseball, NFL and the Olympic Games are the broadcast pioneers of this 4D technology.
Fox Cricket will employ a network of 100 cameras around the stadium to capture these real-time, 360-degree replays – a soon-to-be-announced companion device on the Kayo Sports platform will allow viewers to interact with these 4D replays on additional screens, allowing them to make up their own minds about those dubious calls this summer.
Fox Cricket is also bringing broadcast graphics production in-house – all of which will be debuted during the Australia-India Test series which starts this Friday, November 22, with the first test in Perth.
If this all sounds deeply technical, it’s because it is. All that matters is it will look amazing.
The technology will be informative and additional, rather than intrusive, according to Fox Sport managing director, Steve Crawley, who informs Mumbrella that he’s “not all that big into that sticking scores and that into the sky”.
Crawley explains that, as with cricket itself, you can be waylaid by the figures when making an assessment of quality: “I think the best thing that I want us to do is tell the story and entertain our audience. Everyone always says how many cameras you’ve got. But it’s not a case of the number of cameras. It’s a case of getting it right.”
Crawley knows what he is talking about. Prior to joining Fox Sports in mid-2020, he spent 14 years as head of sport at Nine, with the 2012 Olympic Games broadcast under his belt, plus the network’s NRL and cricket coverage.
Back when Tony Greig and Bill Lawrie were the voices of cricket in Australia, the level of analysis was far less than it is today, with only Richie Benaud providing the level of insight seen in today’s broadcasts.
“He was a commentator second to being a journo,” Crawley reasons of Benaud. “I think that’s why he was so good, because he understood words.”
Crawley has built an enviable commentary team at Fox Cricket, with the likes of Allan Border, Brett Lee, Harsha Bogle, Ravi Shastri, David Warner and Michael Vaughan padding up for this season.
“We’ve done a lot of work on innovation because we figure it’s not going to get any bigger than this and we’ve got India, England, India. It’s an opportunity for us,” he explains.
“I’ve never had a crew of commentators like this going into a series like three in a row like that. So, we’ve tried to get the innovations up to reflect that as well.”
Ravi Shastri faces the media
If it appears Crawley is somewhat playing down the new innovations in store this summer, it’s not through false modesty. “I hate to brag about anything until we’ve proven it,” he explains.
That proof may come soon. This season everything has come together, with the commentary team – built over the past three years – now able to hit the ground running, despite living in all corners of the map.
“Everyone’s part of a team already, so that when we go to Perth tomorrow, it won’t be like it’s new,” he explains.
“We’re just a great team, it’s like a well-oiled machine. People think that you’ve got these really big names and people are full of confidence and that, but actually often they’re really generous people, and they’re very politically correct, and so, you need to break bread and you need to spend some time together and whatever else to have the conversations that’s going to make you feel at home, really comfortable.”
Crawley admits he’s “in their ear all the time” with tips and training. “I’m a pain in the arse,” he confirms. “I’m real bad.”
“I’m not shy about that because the only good thing about being older is that you live through a lot of this sort of stuff,” he laughs. “And so, I can say to them, ‘You’re talking over him’ or ‘Let’s say less’ or ‘Let’s go to Brett Lee about the bowl.'”
Crawley spent some time with the NFL producers in the US earlier this year for the NRL Vegas round and studied how they operate.
“They produce within an inch of their lives,” he marvels. “Like they fly – they have their own planes – they go to a city and they run through their production line by line. Ours isn’t like that. It’s unbelievable. They go through it all, and then they go through with the local media, everything.
“As I said, we’re not like that, but it’s very different now to what it was ten years ago.”
Crawley said, in turn, American production teams were shocked at how efficient the Fox Sport teams were.
“They can’t believe that we cover it with so few people,” he explains. “We don’t have the demarcation that they have over there. A cable hand’s not allowed to do a lot of things over there. When a game finishes, they go and have a pizza for an hour. They don’t pack up. We pack up and go home.
“At the same time, they come around our place and find out how the hell we’re doing something with 80 people that takes them 500.”
The major difference – technology aside – is with the recent onus on crafting a narrative fit for television.
“You tell the story. See, journalism used to be part of television. Journalism was for us journalists and papers and magazines and whatever else. But it’s changed. And they do carry on a lot in television now about storytelling.
“They used to just point the cameras,” he explains of the old broadcasting model. “But, now the trick is telling.”
The Australia-India Test series kicks off on Friday, November 22, in 4K on Kayo Sport and Fox Cricket.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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Allan BorderBrett LeecricketDavid WarnerFOX CricketFox SportsHarsha BogleMichael VaughanRavi ShastriRichie BenaudSteve Crawley
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