Fox News Media is deploying massive tech and production resources for its coverage of the Republican National Convention, with over 400 people on site, 24 plus cameras and over 9,000 feet of fiber connecting broadcast locations around the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisc. where the event will take place.
One staple of political event coverage will, however, be missing. For the first time, Fox News won’t have a mobile production unit on site. It plans to send back all the feeds and content from its cameras and operations back to its New York control rooms using 45 transmission lines.
“This is the first convention since we started doing conventions where we don’t have a mobile unit here on site,” explained Scott Wilder, executive vice president of production and operations at Fox News Media, who oversees all technical, field and production operations of Fox News Media’s special events and breaking news coverage, including the 2024 presidential election.
“Everything we’re doing is being sent as a home run, as we refer to it, back to New York,” he explained. “The producers who would normally sit in a control room are all back in New York, and the director is back in New York. All camera lines go back to New York. Shows are being cut in New York.”
The decision to remotely produce the convention wasn’t a matter of embracing cutting edge technology, Wilder added. “We’re not the first people to do this. Fox Sports have been doing a lot of production this way. Everybody’s very comfortable with the technology.”
Instead, the biggest changes involved modifying their approach to planning and managing the production. “The producers are used to being in the same location as their talent and anchors, so we’ve worked to mitigate that issue,” he said. Their director, for example, spent four days on site blocking out shots, working with the camera people and familiarizing himself with the setup before heading back to New York.
“He now goes back to New York feeling that has a great connection and understanding of the space,” Wilder said.
BACKUPS AND MORE BACKUPS
To handle all the feeds, both the main feeds and the backups, Fox News has forty-five transmission lines from Milwaukee to New York and thirty-one lines from New York to Milwaukee. Those include 16 JPEG XS lines that provide extremely low end-to-end latency.
For quality control and monitoring, they also have an engineering hub in a parking lot near the Fiserv Forum that includes a trailer where they built a facility for monitoring the feeds. “It mimics a mobile production unit in terms of having a monitor wall and being a place where all the tech managers and producers can sit comfortably and we can watch the remote feeds come in and out and see all cameras,” he said.
While most of the transmission is fiber, they have a KU truck in the engineering hub area to provide a satellite backup. For further redundancy they have a streaming backup option as well.
In the engineering hub area they also have a studio van. The van and its studio can be used in an emergency Wilder said if “there is some Secret Service issue or a technology issue. If for some reason we are locked out of the Fiserv we can put an anchor in the van and get them on TV.”
Wilder spoke with TV Tech prior to an attempted assassination attempt on Trump on Saturday July 13, which is likely to make security and redundancy planning at the convention an even bigger issue.
LONG FIBER RUNS
During the RNC, Fox News will be working out of several main areas spread out over a five block area. Those include the Fiserv Forum where the convention is being held, The Gather, the Baird Convention Center and an engineering hub. It has laid more than 9000 feet and 180 strands of fiber to connect its broadcast locations and will be using more than 24 cameras.
Inside Fiserv Forum, Fox has three sets of robotic cameras. Those include Sony FR7 cameras controlled from their engineering trailer as well as Panasonic UE150.
BSI is providing connectivity and comms for Fox, which will have two RF cameras providing feeds. In addition, Wilder said “LiveU come up with some solutions of dedicated Ethernet bandwidth and we will be working with them for one backpack.”
The Fiserv Forum and the other facilities are relatively new, which has made it much easier to get the connectivity they need, Wilder said.
Unlike many earlier conventions, when the networks were given luxury boxes above the arena for their studios, Fox will have a 30,000 square foot spot on the concourse of the Fiserv Forum for its operations. Inside the Fiserv Forum it will have three sets, one of which will use three Sony robotic cameras controlled from the engineering hub.
The end result reflects extensive planning. Wilder says they have been planning for the convention since Milwaukee was announced as the site for the 2024 RNC convention in 2022 and that they were already extremely familiar with the site. The Democratic National Convention was scheduled to be held in Milwaukee in 2020 and Fox already had people in the city when it was canceled at the last minute. “So between that convention, all the visits for that and our debate [in 2023] and now this, we all are very, very familiar,” with the area, Wilder said. “We’ve had people on the ground now for three weeks.”
Fox News Media (FNM) will present live programming surrounding the 2024 Republican National Convention beginning Sunday, July 14th through Thursday, July 18th. Originating from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the network’s convention coverage will be available across all of Fox News Media’s platforms, including Fox News Channel (FNC), Fox Business Network (FBN), Fox News Audio, Fox News Digital and Fox Nation.