THE new sunday express Voices Anand Neelakantan S Vaidhyasubramaniam Ravi Shankar Anu Aggarwal Debashis Chatterjee Mata Amritanandamayi MAGAZINE Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment may 25 2025 SUNDAY PAGES 12 IPL 2025 The science of bringing live action to your TV sets Stadium to Screen The IPL is on TV thanks to fibre connectivity, high-end tech, fail-safe protocols and work of over 1,100 camera crew, producers, talents and designers. A look at how all of them come together to piece together the magic Breaking it down Ever wondered how an IPL match travels from stadia to your TV screens? The following steps gives an insight into the marvel of technology and high-end engineering that’s involved in the process ● Camerapersons at the venue shoot raw footage. These videos are first sent to the two JioStar facilities in Mumbai. Each of the 26 (13 original as well as back-up) feeds are sent via fibre from stadia to the two facilities ● The feeds go to their desks, the PCR for each language. That’s where it’s mixed before the actual output is produced. From the desk, it goes to two transmissions (known as TX). Digital TX and a TV TX ● The time taken for the two steps is under a second ● They are two separate things because when you speak about the TV TX, the video is shot up from our antenna to space. It hits the satellite and goes to whichever city it is being distributed from. If it’s in Delhi, it’s redistributed from whatever nodal point from where it’s captured to your homes ● For digital, it’s slightly different. It’s not one singular TX. You have an android TX, an iOS TX as well as a CTV (connected TV) TX ● The entire process takes under half a minute A PCR Machine E By Swaroop Swaminathan VER witnessed an Indian Premier League match in the flesh? One of the first things you notice is the sea of people slowly moving through rickety turnstiles, the cops trying to direct traffic amid rush hour and the vendors selling cheap jerseys outside stadia. The associated noise and chaos can be enough to make the head spin. In the ongoing edition, the above setting has played itself out in all 13 venues. It offers a perfect contrast to two high-rise buildings— One Unity Centre and Urmi Estate—in Lower Parel in Mumbai. To the outside world, they are just that. Random high-rise buildings. But you can safely call them the league’s 14th and 15th venues. It’s easy to understand why Without . these two facilities in a rapidly developing part of the city the league , would only be accessible to the hundreds of thousands of ticket-holders every year. Thanks to them, the broadcast can be beamed to hundreds of millions of households across the globe. Inside the One Unity Centre (OUC) facility the light is managed, , rooms are temperature-controlled, sound is supervised and your face will be captured across multiple checkpoints before gaining entry . Nicholas Pooran may have made his bat do a lot of the talking in the initial stages of the competition. Mumbai Indians may have sprinkled some stardust to climb up the table in a frenzied three-week push from the middle of April to the beginning of May But the magic, at least according . to the people tasked with the responsibility of beaming live coverage to homes around the globe, isn’t in stadia up and down the country . That magic, for some of the JioStar (the host broadcaster) employees directly or indirectly involved in the production of games, happens on the 28th floor of the OUC. So much so that the 28th floor in the facility has an unofficial moniker: “This is where the magic happens.” Why do they refer to the floor as the one with all the sorcery To put it at a . very rudimentary level, the IPL appears on our TV screens thanks to a marriage of mind-boggling fibre connectivity , extremely high-end technology fail-safe , protocols that wouldn’t be out of place in a military establishment and the work of over 1,100 camera crew, producers, talent (the company’s in-house name for commentators or pundits) and graphic designers. This is a story of how a 1,100-strong contingent acts as one extended family for two-and-a-half months to connect the IPL to the TV audience. *** Summers in India tend to be brutal. In the coastal areas, the humidity sends the ‘feels like’ temperature well into the 40s. In landlocked states in the hinterland, heat waves are as common as mangoes, one of the country’s biggest cultural exports. While the mango continues to be the market leader in what makes the Indian summer somewhat tolerable, the IPL occupies second position. Just like the mango, the league is Indian in make but has its tentacles across the world. The owners of several IPL teams have franchises in at least three countries—South Africa, the US and UK. This association between the mango and the IPL doesn’t end there. Mumbai Indians’ parent company is also one of the largest exporters of mangoes anywhere on the planet. Just like how mango farmers plan a year in advance, the broadcaster also does the same thing. For example, there are already discussions in place to ensure the 2026 edition of the league keeps grabbing eyeballs, from Dhanushkodi to Dharamsala. Siddharth Sharma, Head of Content, Sports, JioStar, is the man responsible for creating an immersive audience-first experience for the broadcaster’s flagship sporting product. “There are many insights that form the foundation for us to really build for the next season,” says Sharma. “Because of the time we take, the gestation time for these plans to incubate and then materialise, we are able to chip at the block and make every pixel count to form the picture that eventually is presented to the fans,” he adds. This sort of immersive experience is needed because Sharma and his team deal with many types of fans. There are people who log on to the league every day of the week and twice on Sunday He calls them ‘the . loyalists’. To ensure people like them keep coming back, he crafts a cricket-first experience. “Those are the fans you treat with utmost respect because you have to serve them the dish in the way that they are accustomed to.” In the ongoing edition, for example, there was a tweak specifically aimed towards the ‘loyalists’. “During the rivalry week, we had the best voices you could think of,” Sharma says. “When the coverage was on, there was a window which showed commentators like Shane Watson, Eoin Morgan and Robin Uthappa creating a sort of watch-along experience.” The idea behind this was simple. Normally you can only hear their , voices, but sometimes you may want to feel the emotion in their voices. “When you put them on screen (next to the game), that emotion is visible,” Sharma says. “That kind of endeared itself to a lot of core fans as they loved the experience. These kind of experiences become personable when the match is going on.” If that’s catering to people who have shelled out expensive fees to buy STBs or OTTs, they also have to curate for ‘fans who watch only the big events’. These fans, Sharma says, are people who are there for the opening game, the knockouts and marquee clashes like Chennai facing Mumbai. “If I have to serve these audiences and give them a taste because they are more entertainment-heavy and cricketlight, it’s important for us to imbue that sentiment into our coverage.” That’s why they have had stand-up comics calling games or getting on board Bollywood stars as they bring their own uniqueness to proceedings. “They talk about their fandom and their love for the game, which speaks to these audiences because they are probably transactional. They are not as deeply rooted as the loyalists. All of 750+ There are over 750 personnel who work inside the facility at the OUC on any given matchday. If it’s a double header, that number swells to upwards of 1,100 Something’s cooking A view of one of the workspaces inside the OUC before the match between Chennai and Kolkata on May 7. As soon as the match begins, an army of people with defined roles begin work. They also deliver packages when requested and put out graphics these learnings go into building the product.” To keep in mind a lot of these factors, there are roughly 25 feeds (a ballpark figure) on a match-by-match basis (some of these feeds are active on weekends) across TV and digital. Advertising all these feeds is one thing; ensuring that they deliver on this is a different thing. This is where the fail-safe nature of the operation comes in. They have a tie-up with two different service providers who deliver fibre connectivity from stadia to both facilities in Mumbai. One can understand why they have these protocols in place. Considering the worth of the product and the eyeballs it attracts, every second translates to ‘x’ amount of money Every second . unaccounted for can directly or indirectly affect the bottom line. *** In the world of video production, there exists a term called run order. It exists for producers, assistant producers, floor managers, camerapersons and anchors to have an understanding of the flow of events. Every second of the run order has to be accounted for and tabulated for. Without it, the producer of the show is—without exaggerating its importance—blind. The ideation and creation of this run order, depending on the producer’s way of working, begins the night before the match in question or the morning of the game. A few of the producers like to begin their work a few hours before they go to bed, But there isn’t any hard and fast rule. It honestly depends from person to person. They look at clips, delegate work, assign video capsules to be prepared and have the nuts and bolts ready to go in the mornings before the game. That, though, is just the beginning of the process of making a run order. For an IPL match beginning at 7.30 pm, a typical run order is from 6.30 pm (right from the time the countdown in the studios starts) till the time the umpire signals for play to start. An archetypal run order contains basic video capsules—most of these capsules are about two minutes long—about the match they are Turn to page 2