Host Broadcast Services says it is deploying 45 cameras per match across all 104 FIFA World Cup fixtures, with Verizon carrying 7 Tb/s of data back to a centralized IBC in Dallas. Here’s what broadcasting the tournament to the world entails.
After a build-up that has been characterized by its arguments and strife, there will be a general sense of relief that the FIFA World Cup actually starts today and the world can start talking about football/soccer rather than the omnishambles of everything else surrounding the tournament.
So, let’s do that. Host Broadcast Services is delivering coverage across 104 matches in 16 cities spanning the USA, Canada and Mexico. It is a production that stretches across four time zones and three countries.
The headline camera figure, a massive 45 being used for every game, is striking enough. But the camera plan is just the start. There’s a lot more that HBS is implementing that shows how broadcasting major sports tournaments is changing.
Speaking at SVG Europe's Football Summit in February, FIFA's head of host broadcast production Oscar Sanchez and HBS senior producer Paul King offered a clear picture of the technical infrastructure underpinning the tournament.
The 45-camera baseline covers polecams, cablecams, RefCams, cine-style cameras, 360-degree cameras and what King describes as "digital-first devices." That last category is a really interesting one and shows how the balance of technological power is shifting.
"When we're looking at those camera plans now, we don't just put the broadcast cameras in," he says. "We put all of the ones that are going to be creating content, because content comes in so many different ways."
In other words, the camera plan is no longer a broadcast document alone. It’s a content document basically, which means that while HBS talks about 45 cameras per game, some of those could well be iPhones. Arguably, in a world where iPhones are used to capture entire baseball matches, that doesn’t really matter, but is possibly worth keeping in mind when comparing coverage across eras.
Either way, from the Round of 32 onwards, the rig scales up with additional Ultra Motion and super-slow-motion cameras. Player cameras, small body-worn or attached units that capture footage from the players' perspective, are also returning, having featured in earlier tournaments.
We’ll find out more about what is actually being used in terms of cameras and lenses once the games start. The World Cup has been notable in the past for pushing the boundaries of broadcast tech, with groundbreaking though commercially unsuccessful Stereo 3D and VR feeds broadcast from previous tournaments. This year there seems to be little experimentation in terms of consumer formats, with a standardization on 4K HDR deemed to be enough to be going on with.
There is innovation elsewhere though. Perhaps the most-discussed element is the RefCam, which makes the jump from its Club World Cup debut last year to full deployment across all 104 matches. It is not, Sanchez is careful to note, a standard feed available to media partners.
"It has specific guidelines," he said. "It is not part of the ISO feeds available for the media partners."
The camera was developed by FIFA's football technology and innovation team alongside the refereeing department, and Lenovo is providing AI stabilization software to smooth out the inherently bouncy footage.
Ref cams are a noted highlight in other sports, especially rugby. But that is a sport where players cannot get away with a fraction of the behavior towards referees that soccer players do. It will be interesting to see how much of the footage ends up being broadcastable.
Lenovo is actually playing a big part at the tournament this year. Its Football AI Pro has been developed for use by all 48 competing teams and analyzes hundreds of millions of FIFA-owned and -organized football data points to generate validated insights in text, video, graphs and 3D visualizations. The idea is that it helps level the playing field for some of the more under-resourced national sides.
HBS is pushing its use of cablecams further. At last year's Club World Cup, a second point-to-point cable camera was added for the Final, and the World Cup plan builds on that precedent.
Also embedded in the rig are cine-style cameras, which proved their worth at Qatar 2022. HBS CEO Dan Miodownik singled them out as among the best performers at that tournament for capturing tunnel sequences, fan moments and close-ups with a shallow depth of field that broadcast cameras simply cannot replicate. They are now a standard part of the kit.
And then there is every football fan’s nemesis, the VAR system (Video Assistant Referee), and a separate, dedicated system for Semi-Automated Offside Technology: between 10 and 14 SAOT cameras per stadium, positioned specifically to track 29 skeletal data points on every player simultaneously. They are not broadcast cameras in the conventional sense, but they are physical infrastructure at every venue and they feed directly into the VAR operation, which is being run centrally from the International Broadcast Centre in Dallas.
Lenovo has been active here too with AI-enabled 3D player avatars. Players have been digitally scanned to create a precise 3D model, allowing the system to track players reliably during fast or obstructed movements.These are also being incorporated into the host broadcast, enabling offside decisions determined by VAR to be displayed more realistically "and in a more engaging way" to fans at stadiums and to viewers around the world.
The 45,000 square metres (484,000 sq ft) IBC for the tournament is housed in the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas. All camera feeds will travel to Dallas via Verizon's broadcast contribution network, which is carrying in the region of 7 terabits per second of data capacity across the 16 venues. Centralized replay, shading and graphics all run from there.
Some replay operators are positioned on-site at venues as a connectivity failsafe, but the design intent is for the majority to be working under the same roof. "Having a centralised facility really allows us to get the best in the world, all working on multiple matches," said King.
HBS also has a post-production and editing hub in London, replicating a model it first used for the 2023 Women's World Cup in Australia and New Zealand. In total, FIFA expects to generate approximately 9,000 hours of content across the tournament.
Verizon has also deployed private 5G networks at all 16 venues, purpose-built to cover the pitch and designed specifically to support high-performance applications within the tournament environment. This includes the Lenovo RefCam, which transmits over private 5G rather than the main contribution network. At the 11 US venues, Verizon has also upgraded public 5G capacity by three to five times to handle the volume of fans uploading content, live-streaming, and accessing match data from inside the stadiums.
FIFA boss Gianni Infantino, not one to hide his light under a bushel, told fans to expect the equivalent of “104 Super Bowls” while selling the concept of the World Cup to US audiences. It would be surprising if the tournament managed to live up to that level of hyperbolic exaggeration, especially given stories of weak ticket sales and slow hotel bookings that have bedeviled the US-hosted matches. Tourists and fans, particularly European ones, seem to be staying away from the group stages at least.
Indeed, it’s hard to get too enthusiastic about the prospect of Germany (one of the tournament favorites) vs Curaçao (pop. 150,000) on a Sunday night. And given that Super Bowl LX had a massive 175 cameras involved in its production, Infantino is characteristically overselling it. But even if you divide the number by four, 26 Super Bowls back to back is going to be a challenge. By the time we get to the Final at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium on 19 July, a massive 38 days away, it will be interesting to see how the world’s broadcasters have risen to the challenge.