NEP has been working across all NFL International Series games over the last two months, from Australia and Brazil to the UK and mainland Europe.

NEP Australia was on hand when the Melbourne Cricket Ground hosted the first-ever NFL regular season game played in Australia on 10 September, when the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams took the field in front of more than 100,000 fans. The NEP Australia team worked behind the scenes alongside Netflix, NBC Sports and a group of partners to help deliver a world-class production from Melbourne to audiences around the globe, using 54 cameras, a major IP-based production environment handling approximately 25,000 ST 2110 flows, and production workflows spanning Melbourne and the US.

Then later that month on 27 September, a global NEP team – including engineering and operations crew from NEP Americas and NEP Middle East – created a home game experience for its partners delivering the Baltimore Ravens versus Dallas Cowboys game production in Rio de Janeiro. Using a fully IP, TFC-powered flypack production kit, NEP created the same production environment the CBS Sports production team works in every week.

More recently, NEP UK wrapped the match at Stade de France, Paris on 25 October where the Pittsburgh Steelers played the New Orleans Saints for ESPN. Prior to that, the team worked on the three London-based NFL games for the broadcaster, and they have two more European matches still to go.

Commercially, the NFL International Series is redistributed every year so its partners work on a one year cycle. “Last year we won it with Fox and they got every single game,” says Tim Deacon, technical projects manager at NEP UK. “This year, ESPN took five of the European games and the sixth went to Fox and we’ve retained all six European games. We’ve had a very long relationship with Fox, while ESPN are relatively new to us. We did do a game for them in 2023, but we won all five this season with them, which is fantastic.”

NEP’s crew on location in Paris at Stade de France for the Pittsburgh Steelers vs New Orleans Saints game on 25 October

Rock ‘n’ roll

All the international games are close together, but four have and will cause pressure for the NEP team to get the show literally on the road and into new countries, ready to broadcast the next match the following weekend.

The final London game took place at Wembley Stadium on 18 October with the Jaguars taking on the Houston Texans, then on 25 October the trucks had to be ready for the Pittsburgh Steelers vs the New Orleans Saints in Paris. Coming up, the NFL takes to Madrid, Spain on 8 November with Bengals vs Falcons, then the team has to make it into another country ready for Patriots vs Lions on 15 November in Munich, Germany.

Read more New York, London, Paris: How the NFL’s comms infrastructure is adapting to life on the road

Continues Deacon: “We treat this as a ‘pack-down onto the road as fast as possible’ gig, especially once we get into Europe where we have some quite tight timings; for the show trucks, we pulled the show down on Sunday night [in London], then by Monday morning, they’re on the road to Paris. And then once we finish in Madrid, we’ve got to get from Madrid to Munich in two and a half days, so we fly our double drivers, we have a whole separate crew doing the show, we have to plan vehicle movements and load-out movements really, really carefully because you have to hit those timings. And in Europe, the roads are different and the rules are different, so actually getting the show in on time is half the battle.”

NEP did not consider using different trucks for those logistically challenging games because, says Deacon, “it was really important to us and to ESPN that [crew are] not starting with a blank sheet of paper every week”.

He adds: “We haven’t got time to rebuild the show across different trucks. It’s nearly three days just to prepare the truck on site for the new crew. So the fact that they can walk away [at the end of one match], come back and get the truck open and just carry on with the same names, bases and kit and configs, it’s the only way you can make this work now because it’s such a big show.”

Little slice of Americana

The NFL international games are indeed like a rock and roll tour. This is not only about American football; there is a plethora of entertainment linked to each game that the broadcast encapsulates.

Explains Deacon: “It’s a whole day out. It’s a little slice of America for a whole afternoon, with the cheerleaders and the food and different fans represented. You walk into that stadium at, say, one o’clock in the afternoon before the game, and you’ve got six hours of American culture. Obviously, the sport’s important, but it’s a whole lifestyle just for a day. It’s incredible.”

NEP has had to adapt to certain American technical ways of producing for its primary market for these events. Deacon explains: “There’s some technicalities. There are some ways that they run replay. We’re shooting the whole show in 59.94, so we’re shooting US frame rates because our primary service is out to the US market, so we shoot US frame rates, then we convert down to 50 hertz for local takers, so RTL Germany, when they come to Munich, or when BeIN France and France TV are in Paris, they have to get the European frame rates, so we do all that handoff for them. We spend a lot of our time effectively translating American into European or feet into centimetres.

“One of the big things, especially for US networks, is this is not just a regular season game at home where they plug in and rock up. The scale of games are bigger. We have international takers, which they don’t worry about normally.

“We as NEP service a lot of those people, so we do the big screen production for Van Wagner; that’s a whole unit from London. RTL Germany have got a German NEP truck out of Munich and they’re doing some bits. BeIN France are being supported by NEP Belgium. So we’ve always got a presence somewhere and that handoff between [us and those takers] means when [the European rights holders] get to site, they know that they’re being looked after completely by one brand, but their local divisions; the RTL guys know the NEP Germany guys, and that whole big team effort is just what no one else can do. We’ve got the facilities and the crew to deliver at that scale across the entire region. No one’s really placed to be like that.”