There was a lot to see in the world of tennis last week. Roger Federer shushed Novak Djokovic’s parents. Djokovic retired from his semifinal match against Federer, raising questions about his health and his attitude, concerns that seemed to be a thing of the past when he won his first major in Melbourne earlier in the year. And of course, Rafael Nadal won another clay court title, once again over Federer in an entertaining final.
It was a fine start to the clay season, but it could have been a lot better if I had seen one other thing: the ball. In my hours of watching the Monte Carlo Masters on the Tennis Channel and on Masters Series TV, the ATP’s online broadcasting operation, the only time I could see the most important object in the sport was on a replay of a superb shot. Otherwise, I witnessed two men swinging racquets, grunting, and sliding side to side in an attempt, for all I could tell, to swat flies. The quality of the viewing device made no difference. Whether on a traditional television (our office), a 19-inch flat screen computer monitor (home computer), or a modern flat screen television (according to a colleague), the ball was nowhere to be found in Monte Carlo.
The Tennis Channel received complaints from viewers and wasn’t happy with the images it received from what’s known as the “world feed” (the ATP’s television arm, not the Tennis Channel, produced the coverage and delivered it to broadcasting partners). Folks at Tennis Channel said the problem wasn’t caused by the production crew, which, they said, was an experienced and talented one, but by the infrastructure of the Monte Carlo event. The court is near the water and bathed in sunlight. The cameras are placed higher than Tennis Channel would like (the angle tends to flatten the ball). And since the signal is delivered in a European format, Tennis Channel must convert it to the U.S. standard (which can affect image quality). A power outage also interrupted the broadcast during the week, causing Tennis Channel to cut to other programming for about 15 minutes.
“It’s a very difficult place to shoot,” said Larry Meyers, the Tennis Channel’s senior vice president of production and executive producer. “The odds are stacked against you a little bit at that tournament.”
Meyers and a Tennis Channel spokesman, Eric Abner, said no one was pleased with quality of the broadcast and that they hoped to correct it for next season (lowering the camera ought to help, Meyers said). They also said the same problems should not arise at the Rome and Hamburg Masters, where it’s easier to produce a high-quality image.
Meyers, who joined the Tennis Channel from Fox Sports Net when the company was started in 2002, has produced sports on television for more than 25 years, including tennis, baseball, basketball, hockey, and Olympic sports. I asked him whether he agreed that the broadcasting techniques used in tennis had changed (and improved) less than they had in other sports. Yes and no, he said. He said hockey was perhaps the best comparison.
“We were over-aggressively trying to get closer, tighter, into how [hockey] was covered,” Meyers said. He said the size of the puck was, and still remains, a problem, but one that is more acceptable than constantly cascading cameras or pucks that glow and leave behind a trail of red light.
“If you look now, it has gone back to how it was a few years ago,” he said. “You run the risk of creating geographic disorientation for the viewer.”
Meyers said that while tennis has seen innovations in replays and in super-slow motion footage (which you won’t see at the Masters tournaments, but will at events produced by Tennis Channel), it’s dominant perspective hasn’t changed much, other than lowering the camera to view the match more head on, rather than from above (that angle was sorely missed at the tournaments in Indian Wells and Key Biscayne, where Fox Sports Net used the world feed).
“As much as we’ve tried different things,” Meyers said, “for the viewer to really follow the match, you still have to be on that wider end-zone angle during play.”
If you’ve had the pleasure of watching tennis from a few rows behind the court, you understand how much of the game is lost on television, especially when the camera angle is too severe. On television, tennis too often looks slow. Only up close to you realize how fast players move, how much strain they put on their knees when they slide on hard courts, how much spin they apply to the ball (live, the ball jumps off the court; on television, it seems to sit up), and how quickly they must prepare to hit a shot. Meyers says we are not too far away from a time when viewers have options (not just which court to watch, but from which camera angle).
“It’s becoming much more technically viable and financially viable,” Meyers said. “The Steve Jobs vision is you can be sitting in your living room with the big screen TV, and you could create your own multi-screen—put the match in left two-thirds, plus an isolated ground-level view of Federer in one box and of Nadal in the other. It’s coming pretty fast because the ability to distribute those feeds to you—the technology is pretty much there, it’s just a matter of delivery.”
As always, the future sounds fantastic—the sooner it arrives, the better. Until then, a better view of the ball would suffice.
Tom Perrotta is a senior editor at TENNIS magazine.