Pan Am Report - ESPN Gives "Good Flavor" of Games, Says Producer

(ATR) Spanish-speaking sports fans in the United States – as well as anyone interested in watching the 2011 Pan American Games no matter their language skills – can view a minimum of three hours of live coverage a day on ESPN Deportes.

Available in 5.3 million households and online at ESPN3.com, the network is broadcasting more than 100 hours with ESPN2 pitching in an additional 20-25 hours in English. Highlights from Guadalajara are also being shown on SportsCenter and other ESPN properties, in turn driving viewership to the live events.

Even though only 41 countries and the former Netherlands Antilles are competing in the Pan Ams, coverage will reach more than 110 countries, according to organizers.

The networks televising the Games came in with no worries about the quality of the host broadcaster world feed –it's provided by International Sports Broadcasting, led by Olympic veteran Manolo Romero.

"We're working very closely with the world feed broadcaster, ISB, and also with COPAG, so everything is pretty much running smoothly for us," coordinating producer Josephine Allevato tells Around the Rings.

ESPN, which has about 90 staffers in Mexico, has enhanced its production with a studio set on location outside the Guadalajara Cathedral. The hosts are Jose Ramon Fernandez, a popular figure in Mexico; Andres Agulla, who is also popular in the Latin American world; and Mauricio Pedroza, a SportsCenter anchor.

ESPN also has six crews – including Latin American reporters –that can be dispatched to different venues to provide supplementary footage and "make it more of the ESPN brand," Allevato says. "We're out there getting the stories that other people may not find."

"We're really trying to serve the U.S. Hispanic fan of Deportes with coverage of all these Latin American countries that they don't necessarily get on a daily basis," adds Sonia Gomez, programming manager for ESPN Deportes. "We're really trying to go across as many sports as we can from beach volleyball to gymnastics, soccer to basketball and swimming. We're expecting to do really well."

Ratings have been over a 1.0, a good number for the cable network.

"The big thing is covering the story," says ESPN producer Michael Leonard. "If a Mexican wins, we're going to cover it. If a Brazilian wins, we're going to cover it. It's not about producing it for a specific country; it's about producing it as the Pan Am Games and capitalizing on every opportunity that comes our way and getting that out to the fan."

With so many events happening at the same time, ESPN Deportes must pick and choose what to show. "I've been given the liberty to jump accordingly," Leonard says. "The biggest thing for me at the end of the day is not second-guessing what I've done."

If ESPN Deportes cuts away from one sport to go to another, "viewers are never left hanging," Allevato says. "They'll see the end of things, but we really do jump around. We treat it as the Olympics do: you're giving them a good flavor of everything that's happening."

That job is easier because of working with ISB, which knows exactly how to cover multi-sport events.

"There's no dead time," Allevato says. "If something changes, we get emails so we can prepare ourselves."

Finesse with World Feed

The 2007 Pan Ams in Rio de Janeiro were the first regional games to be covered by ISB, but Romero has been broadcasting the Olympics since 1968.

"We have a model that we adapt to each Games, depending upon whether it's an Olympics, a Paralympics or a Pan Am Games," says Mark Parkman, vice president of operations. "And it's like an accordion: we adjust it to the size of the project, but for the most part it's the same system that's been pretty successful."

ISB is providing 860 hours of high-definition broadcasting. That sounds like a lot until you consider the Olympics in Beijing had more than 5,000 hours.

"In gymnastics, we do seven feeds at the Olympics – one for every apparatus and an integrated feed," Parkman says. "Here, we're doing only an integrated feed. It's pretty difficult to coordinate because you have to put things to tape and then you roll it back into the live production."

ISB has more than 600 people on site, including crews from Spain, Cuba and Mexico in addition to those from the U.S.

"We try to bring the ones who are specialists in sports that we're covering," Parkman says.

All 36 sports have some coverage, including 20 which have live coverage. Some, like baseball, are covered both live and by crews filming highlights.

"The sports that we are doing live are the ones that we have had discussions with COPAG and with broadcasters and we knew that those are the ones that they're most interested in," Parkman says. "There's really no sense in doing everything live if the broadcasters aren't going to be able to utilize all that live coverage, so it's scaled to the needs of the customers."

Broadcasters provide their own commentary based on shot sheets and do interviews in the mixed zone.

International Broadcast Center

Sixteen broadcasters have facilities in the International Broadcast Center, which is also coordinated by ISB. That compares to more than 100 at the Summer Olympics (among the 200 or so who are broadcasting the Games).

ISB also offers facilities in the venues so broadcasters there can transmit their unilateral coverage back to the IBC via a fiber optic network.

"Every games has challenges," Parkman says, "from making sure that everything's done on time to being able to make sure all the logistics are going to work. We've been fairly successful here in terms of getting everything ready. Some of it went down to the wire in some cases, but so far so good."

Parkman and Romero spend their time mostly in the Broadcast Quality Center, which is a combination of production quality control and an operations center. Three or four producers in the room are in communication with all of the mobile units to monitor coverage, making sure everything is running on time and following the production guidelines.

ISB also has a broadcast venue manager in every venue to look after its needs and the needs of the broadcasters.

"And if they can't resolve the problem in the venue, then they call us and we communicate with COPAG's main operations center and resolve it that way," Parkman says.

ISB is also working already on London 2012.

"We pride ourselves on being able to adapt to wherever we are in the world," Parkman says.

Toronto 2015 Plans

ESPN Deportes, which also aired a similar number of hours from the 2007 Pan Ams, hopes to continue to show the event even though the parent company has not been able to acquire the Olympic rights.

"It's our goal to do Toronto," Gomez says. "We feel this is a big property for Deportes, for ESPN in general, too. Having it be Canada which is an English-speaking country, there is potential for that to go even further on ESPN2 and on the English-language platforms for us."

Reported in Guadalajara by Karen Rosen.

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