Behind-the-scenes at The Wimbledon Channel

Tennis fans are somewhat spoiled for choice when it comes to watching the action from Wimbledon. The BBC alone airs more than 200 hours of content from the grounds each year. And, to supplement this, over recent years the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) has been busy creating its own content platform, providing an immediate snapshot of what’s happening at Wimbledon at any given time of the day.

The AELTC’s coverage is collected together on a digital platform called The Wimbledon Channel, which is produced by IMG.

Broadcast Sport caught up with IMG executive producer Tim Lacy at Wimbledon earlier this week to find out more.

“We have a team of 30 on the ground at Wimbledon – five are talent, made up of two presenters and three reporters. Up to the quarter finals, we have ‘flash rights’ to show one game per set per match, across 18 televised courts. So, we zip around and do live updates from around the ground.

“The rest of the content is news, analysis and studio chat with players. We also have a camera in the players’ hotel, so we can do remote interviews from there too. We stream live content 1-7pm each day. The breakdown is a third live action, a third studio/pundit analysis and a third is ‘colour’.

“We tend to have a different guest with us each hour. We have access to a pool of tennis stars who typically join us for an hour each. We also bring some players in virtually, via a ‘Zoom-style’ screen.”

After the quarter finals, the live rights are no longer available, so IMG then ramps up the on-the-ground interviews with fans and players from its RF cameras around the grounds.

“We speak to fans, ball boys, strawberry sellers and so on, and we also go to the practice courts to do regular coverage reports from there,” explains Lacy.

All cameras from the grounds are fed into the gallery where the IMG team produces and packages its live broadcasts. Content goes out on the Wimbledon app, on The Wimbledon Channel website, across Wimbledon’s social platforms and is also offered to rights holding broadcasters to use as they wish.

Broadcast Sport also spoke to Alexandra Willis, communications and marketing director at AELTC, who told us The Wimbledon Channel builds on a strategy the AELTC has had in place for the last 10 years, around its digital transformation and audience engagement.

“We wanted to ensure we had the best-in-class digital offering, with great content tailored to the needs of our audience,” she said. “There are corporate objectives as part of this too - If you look after your brand and audience, it increases the value of your property, and we also include sponsorship-led pieces as part of the content.”

“When we developed the platform, we did quite a lot of research in the sports industry and what makes rights holders’ digital platforms compelling,” continues Willis. “This showed that a live offering was essential. We didn’t have this, so we worked with broadcasters to carve out a set of rights for a live ‘flash’ channel, providing a helicopter view of what’s happening at Wimbledon at that moment. It complements and doesn’t compete with what’s being broadcast on TV.

“We’ve been running the Wimbledon Channel for seven years now, and it’s obviously iterated a bit over the years since then. It used to be called Live At Wimbledon and was initially much more based around a studio-based show, but we reduced that element considerably to put our presentation team on the ground to give the audience much more of a feel of being at Wimbledon.”