Broadcaster is taking advantage of the cutting-edge studio to enhance its coverage on election night and the day after
“As soon as we saw it, we all thought upstairs, ‘this is built for an election.’”
Sky News’ head of studio output, Ben Fisher, had long been hoping to get his hands on the Sky Sports Monday Night Football studio, which opened last August and Broadcast Sport visited in August 2023. Now, the news team is getting its chance, with the facility to be used on both election night and the day after, with its LED screens, floor, and AR graphics on hand to explain the results to the public.
Ed Conway, one of the presenters who will be at the heart of the action, told Broadcast Tech that he hopes this will bring visual data and analysis to new coverage in the same way that Monday Night Football has for football: “I feel like we’re doing the same thing with an election. If it works, then hopefully that’s a model for us and other broadcasters to do more of it in future.”
The studio is just one part of a large production, with over 300 people working on it, 22 OBs, and around 60 students at counts around the country with cameras and LiveU tech to cover the counts. Some of the production team have been borrowed from Sky Sports, Fisher said, “they know the studio better than me.”
The studio will be key. Fisher revealed, “We’re telling the story within the studio, which is quite different for us because we normally we send hundreds of presenters out on election night. We are still everywhere, but we’re so much within the studio now, it’s much more of an immersive experience.”
That studio experience will include AR images of constituency results and sitting MPs on top of its LED floor - which itself will show a map of the UK split into hexagons that represent consituencies, with the results playing out in real time. There is also a full AR recreation of Downing Street, “where all our big moments will happen,” Fisher says, which even includes an AR Larry The Cat, “which will pop in every so often if I remember to queue him!” There are also full 3D recreations of Conservative and Labour Party leaders Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer, and the use of innovative cameras such as a Spidercam to cover a bird’s eye view, a Steadicam used around the studio, and a jib on the main camera.
The area that would usually have a tactics board has been changed, with its LED ‘totems’ to be used for visuals and analysis, and the large LED screen at the centre of the studio will be where Conway will explain much of the night’s results through graphics and data visualisations. It will also be used as a live screen for interviews and views of counts - with 102 live feeds from around the country being shown at the same time at points.
The set up with the new screen has its advantages too, Conway said, “It used to be the case, that you’d have to have a guess at every single potential chart long in advance and then have them built now, essentially.” However, that process has been sped up considerably. “Historically [creating charts has] been measured in in, probably, hours,” but it is now down to, “minutes.”
Overall, Conway said, “The televisual experience of it is much more dynamic because we’ve got a Steadicam following me. We’re moving around different parts of the studio, whereas a lot of election coverage historically has been wise people sitting at a desk.” There will still be that desk area as a part of the setup, with Ruth Davison and Andy Burnham among up to six at a time giving analysis there.
Conway, who will be on screen alongside lead presenters Kay Burley and Sophy Ridge, as well as Beth Rigby, Trevor Phillips, and Sam Coates, explained that some of the inspiration for the production has come from the US, particularly how American broadcasters show the night evolving, rather than as a sudden, completed set of results. “We’re constantly looking at how they do it in the US. We’ve got a closer relationship now that we’re part of Comcast, we have this relationship with NBC. We’re learning a lot about the things that we could take that would make our coverage better, and hopefully they’re learning something from us, but we’ll see.”
Conway will also be the first broadcast journalist allowed into the exit poll’s “locked room”, where the analysts work out the likely winner of the election. He will be ferried to and from the location in a Sky News Election Night branded taxi, broadcasting from within it, and said of the breakthrough, “[In the past,] when the exit poll numbers come out, it’s been this big monolithic thing, ‘Here is the number of seats for each of the parties,’ then we’ve had a call with Michael Thrasher, and BBC has spoken to John Curtice for background. This time around it’s my job to relay the context, the historical detail, the nuance about what’s going on beneath those figures.”
If anything goes wrong at Sky Studios, viewers will be taken to Grimsby, the town Sky News has “adopted” to show a microcosm of the election, as disaster recovery. Fingers will be crossed that this doesn’t have to be used, and Conway divulged, “We’ve never had quite so much resource and thought going into it as we do this time around. Which makes it exciting, but quite nerve wracking as well.”
Sky News’ election coverage starts from 9pm on Thursday 4 July and runs throughout Friday on Sky News (Freeview 233).
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