ORLANDO, Fla. — LeBron James had just exited a Mickey Mouse-decorated bus last week when the superstar’s arrival for that night’s Lakers game was spotted by Camera 50, one of the nearly 100 remote-operated cameras stationed around Disney World’s ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex.
A half-mile away in a humid parking lot, James’ stone-faced entrance at HP Field House was registered by Mike Schwab, a television director scanning a wall of glowing, shoebox-sized feeds inside a 53-foot ESPN production truck. He could not linger on the image for long.
Surrounded by a producer, audio engineer, associate director and technician, Schwab was directing an afternoon game between the Memphis Grizzlies and Utah Jazz. With more than a minute to play before halftime, Jazz center Rudy Gobert had begun looping behind the defense for an alley-oop.
In the truck, a replay was queued up after the dunk. Then another. Viewers watching on regional networks in Memphis and Salt Lake City saw them seconds later.
“Oh, that’s nice!” a producer exclaimed.
The NBA and its players weren’t sure when they’d see highlights like this again while stuck in limbo for four months because of COVID-19. But they understood that the success of any restart plan would require adapting to the pandemic’s new reality — one location, daily testing, fewer staffers, more logistical hurdles.
As the league hammered out details to stage games, its television broadcast partners, including ESPN, scrambled to ensure fans would be able to watch them. They had no script to follow, only one question to avoid: If the NBA holds a 22-team restart but fans can’t watch in person, did it really happen?
The result has been tricked-out arenas, more remote-operated cameras than ever and basketball broadcasts that, by necessity, look like nothing else seen before. All of it is anchored by the bubble within the NBA’s bubble — a 200,000-square-foot broadcast production complex shared by ESPN and Turner Sports and connected to the Wide World of Sports complex by a short walk and 436 miles of fiber cable.
“I’ve never personally worked an Olympics,” said Mike Shiffman, ESPN’s vice president of production. “But in talking to folks who’ve set up for it, this is much more of an Olympics-type setup given the amount of trucks and trailer space than we would have for a normal event.”
Before the pandemic, ESPN produced a typical NBA game from one truck, with up to 10 people working snugly within its largest compartment. In the restart compound, there are 13 trucks — two per network per arena, as a means of spreading out workers now divided by plastic shields. They are surrounded by 31 office trailers, 20 generators that supply all of the site’s power, two catering tents and red Coca-Cola machines offering free mid-shift pick-me-ups.
To get here, ESPN, Turner and the NBA had to first agree on health and safety rules, twice-weekly testing protocols, camera locations and how they would share their technology. They also had to coordinate staffing. While the majority of the 170 to 200 ESPN workers here at any given time live in a hotel close to the edge of the Disney property, a handful of its camera operators, producers and reporters live inside the bubble, near the teams, and were required to quarantine upon their arrival in Florida.
“I’ve done Super Bowls and World Series and this has been infinitely more challenging,” said Steve Hellmuth, the NBA’s executive vice president of media and technology. “You can’t just put someone on an airplane and say, ‘Go to work, you’re Camera 2 tomorrow.’ “
STAGING games without fans is a worst-case scenario for the league’s bottom line. Commissioner Adam Silver told players in May that 40% of league revenue is derived from game nights.
And yet, for broadcasters tasked with designing and producing the best television possible, empty arenas represented unprecedented opportunity.
Underneath each court, 36 contact microphones were placed to pick up sneaker squeaks and dribbles. Empty seats are obscured by 17-foot-tall video boards ringing three sides of the court on which the feeds of 320 fans watching from home are digitally stitched into seats. More than 20 cameras are positioned inside each arena — including new angles such as “rail cam,” which runs the length of the court — but only a fraction are operated in person.
