Calrec: Riding the Waves of Change in Sports and Emerging Victorious

By Sid Stanley, general manager at Calrec.

 As per a recent document titled ‘Game Changing: How sport makes us happier, healthier and better connected’ [Sky Sports 2024], adults in the UK dedicated over 9 billion hours to watching and participating in sports throughout 2023.

Naturally; sports offer a distinct form of unscripted drama unfolding in real time, and it wouldn’t surprise us if the statistics for 2024 surpass those figures dramatically. This year has indeed been remarkable for live unscripted sports drama, but 2024 has also experienced a transformation in how we consume sports material. The latest IABM State of MediaTech Report indicates a substantial shift, stating that streaming has overtaken broadcast television as the preferred mode of content consumption. By July 2024, 41% of viewership in the US was attributed to streaming services, compared to just 20% on broadcast channels.

This shift is generational, and it is unlikely to revert anytime soon. Ofcom reports that fewer than half of viewers (48%) aged 16-24 engage with broadcast television on a weekly basis, a decline from 76% in 2018. Similarly, those aged 45-54 are also gravitating away from broadcast television, with viewership dropping from 89% to 84% in just a single year.

This inevitability fosters investments in sports by unconventional media companies, which is already evident. Netflix has entered the scene with agreements signed with WWE and the NFL, not to mention November’s headline-making Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul match, which left some spectators frustrated when the stream experienced delays and, in some cases, crashed entirely, with 60 million households globally watching. In 2025, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Fox are set to unveil their collaborative sports streaming service.

Against the trend

In spite of all this, live sports are demonstrating remarkable resilience; in fact, live sports are the most stalwart aspect of broadcast television. From SailGP to the French and US Open tennis, Wimbledon, the Euros, Open Golf Championship, Formula E, and the upcoming Summer Games in Paris, we’ve partaken in a diverse array of events in 2024, which are defying prevailing trends. For instance, the final of the 2024 Euros between Spain and England pulled in 24.2 million viewers on the BBC and ITV [SportsProMedia 2024]. This accounts for 35% of the entire UK population.

Numerous tournaments were held in sequence, prompting broadcasters to adopt smarter strategies to ensure enough coverage for both terrestrial and streaming audiences. More than in any prior year, Calrec collaborated with broadcasters to create hybrid on-site, distributed, and on-prem workflows aimed at enhancing efficiency, generating additional content, and providing content providers with the means to deliver superior sound quality to viewers.

Golf continually presents challenges due to geographic factors and distances; the Open Championship in Scotland proved to be a technically challenging production once again, utilizing 151 cameras, 225 microphones, and a fleet of Calrec RP1s for IFBs. SailGP, now in its fourth season and hosting events globally, leveraged its remote workflows to mix all audio in London, while much of the mixing technology for the Wimbledon tennis event had such a tight turnaround that some broadcasters transported OBs directly from London to Paris for the Summer Games.

Yet many others didn’t even require that.

Olympic endeavor

Calrec has been a consistent presence at the Summer Games since 1996, and in 2024, more broadcasters than ever utilized mix facilities from remote locations. The 2022 Beijing Games represented a significant transition for many of Calrec’s clients, with broadcasters such as NBC Sports employing fully remote workflows for comprehensive coverage from the International Broadcast Centre for the first time.

This summer, they adopted even more remote, distributed, and hybrid networks, allowing them to capitalize on remote efficiencies while simultaneously delivering extra content to streaming and social media platforms like TikTok. BBC Sport also embraced a hybrid strategy, employing on-site mixers along with mixers stationed at the BBC in Salford, UK.

France TV utilized its newly designed hybrid UM1 and UM2 trucks as supplementary control rooms at their Paris headquarters, while Croatian broadcaster Hrvatska Radiotelevizija (HRT) implemented remote production workflows for event coverage for the first time.

These new and more efficient working methods appear to evolve continuously—and indeed they are—but broadcasters still require support. From a support standpoint, this entails engaging with far more intricate workflows where consoles no longer function in isolation. Remote and distributed workflows can position IP processing cores on-site, at the edge, or on-premise, thus enhancing the flexibility of mixing environments to adjust to the demands of a production rather than conforming to a predetermined format.

More crucially, centralizing production empowers broadcasters to generate more content across additional channels. Many discussions we’re having with sports broadcasters echo this sentiment, focusing less on hardware and more on optimizing resource utilization.

Sports broadcasters aim to produce content for events that previously weren’t economically feasible, as well as more personalized content for events that were. While viewing behaviors will undoubtedly continue to evolve, this is how the industry can adapt accordingly.