Hosting the first ever sporting event at the Sphere this weekend has brought a lot of opportunity to the UFC, but also a lot of hurdles to overcome.
Whilst the venue that will play host to UFC 306 on September 14 is state of the art for those in attendance, it comes with a lot of unanswered questions.
A lot has been made about the tribute to the Mexican people that the event is themed around but for the fans at home that won’t be sat in front of the enormous screen, would it feel any different to a regular PPV card in a standard arena?
UFC director Craig Borsari and his team have put extensive work into this specific area to make sure that even the fans that aren’t in the building get to witness something unique and special.
UFC Director On Improving Viewing Experience For Fans At Home
In a recent interview with Shakiel Mahjouri, Borsari detailed the steps that they had to take when considering how they could make the viewing experience for fans watching around the world feel as close to the live event as possible.
It would have been easy for the promotion to put on a spectacle inside the Sphere and try to adapt this venue for their regular style of PPV broadcasts, but that wasn’t going to cut it.
Borsari spoke about how, in order to make this event feel special and really get across the feeling of being inside the Sphere from the opposite side of a screen, they brought in new staff and equipment to facilitate the best possible broadcast.
“One of those principles you just touched on which is we wanted the viewer at home to have an experience as close to being inside the Sphere as possible which required us to bring in two separate TV trucks in addition to our normal A and B unit fight trucks, a separate director so Glenn Weiss is the director who will sit in one of those trucks, a whole separate set of cameras that will be designed to capture all of the content on the media plane in a way where we’re not going full frame in the broadcast but it feels as if you’re seated in the 300 or 400 level inside the Sphere watching the show.
“We could have gone about this and not put those TV trucks in place and not put those separate cameras in place and really brought you a visual experience that’s vert similar to any pay-per-view we would go on any given Saturday night, but this is a unique event and we took a very unique approach and felt that it was important for viewers at home to get the sense of the volume of the space that they’re in and try to experience that. I mean there’s nothing like being there but we wanted to come as close as we possibly could.”
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