By Jake Bourke

As viewing habits continue to evolve, live sports remains one of the most resilient and adaptable sectors of the media industry. postPerspective spoke with two very different organizations — the Boston Celtics and World Chase Tag — about how they’re approaching the future, with one focused on creating a better in-venue experience and the other refining its broadcast infrastructure and post production workflow to reach audiences across streaming and social media.

Jake Wendling is the VP of live production entertainment for the Boston Celtics and has been with the NBA team for 20 seasons. He and his team are responsible for curating the in-arena fan experience and managing the audiovisual aspects of a game night. The music, the lights, the timeout entertainment, halftime, the national anthem and even Lucky, the Celtics’ beloved mascot, all fall upon the collective shoulders of his department.

But the job has evolved. As the media landscape shifts and new platforms compete relentlessly for attention, even storied franchises must think creatively to stay relevant. Sports, once insulated by tradition, now face the same pressures as any modern entertainment brand.

Positioned at the center of that transformation for his team, Wendling is helping the Celtics adapt to a post-pandemic world dominated by social media and short-form content. We spoke with him about how the organization is rethinking the live experience to meet the expectations of today’s fans.

In the world of social media, where attention is currency, how have the Celtics used technology to keep audiences engaged and immersed? And what are some examples of this technology?
Right off the bat, we have found so many new and different ways for us to engage with our fans in real time, keeping them immersed. We have a team of editors who create the content that goes live on the jumbotron, and we want audiences to engage with that content, laughing and having fun. Our goal is to make the audience a part of the show, giving them different was to participate.

In the past, fans would participate in a shooting contest on court or be part of a video board contest where they could win a prize. It was a system that rewarded people within a row or even a full section of seating. We’ve been looking for solutions that allow anybody in the arena to participate instead of having to be chosen at the right time or the right place.

We’ve been having a lot of “scan to participate” activations, mostly through scanning QR codes. Fan voting is always fun to see. For example, seven minutes before the game starts, we’ll put up a QR code and ask the fans some simple questions, such as what song they want to hear next. Our DJ will then give them three different choices, and you’ll see the votes being counted in real time. We’ll let the voting go on for about a minute, and once the results are in, the DJ will play the winner. It makes the fans say, “Hey, I chose the song that’s now playing!”

On the player side, we’ve introduced interactive video segments that unfold across multiple timeouts. For example, during one timeout, we’ll feature a player ranking something fun, like their favorite sports to watch or their favorite pizza toppings. Then, in the following timeout, we’ll show a second player’s rankings. After both segments have aired, we’ll display a graphic comparing the two players’ choices and invite fans to weigh in.

“Fan of the Game” is another popular activation that also uses the scan-to-participate format. We’ll show short clips of three different fans and display their photos on the screen. From there, fans in the arena can vote in real time on who they think deserves the title. Once the votes are in, we’ll go live to the winning fan in the crowd and award them a prize. It’s all about gamifying the experience.

What is your perspective on technologies like virtual production – LED volumes, AR tech, immersive environments – and how they might impact how the Celtics market themselves and perhaps create more engaging fan experiences?
We do use these more modern technologies, but on the flip side, we also use a traditional bluescreen for some of our content. It’s pretty cool, actually. The bluescreen is where we’ll film some of that player content, like the “Rank your favorite pizza toppings” segments during timeout. It’s easily keyable, and for our needs, it remains convenient for our editors.

Bigger moments, like our opening video, are major productions. We film those before the season starts, working with production companies to construct the sets and using those LED backdrops to create those dynamic backgrounds and alternate environments.

We can also change things on the fly. We typically get a limited window with each player, so having interactive backgrounds is a huge advantage. They can react to them in real time and give us a range of looks that we can use throughout a game. We’ve used this approach when filming our fourth-quarter videos. In a close game coming out of a timeout, you’ll see a player hyping up the crowd — “Get on your feet; make some noise” – and we can quickly shift the background to match that high-energy moment. At the same time, we can capture more neutral looks for player headshots or elements that tie into our opening video.

On the more immersive side, we’ve experimented with some really creative concepts for our opening videos. In past shoots, we’ve brought in professional drone teams to create interactive environments. The players could actually engage with the drones in real time, moving their arms to make the drones spread out or close in around them. The drones were lit and actively filming, so they weren’t just visual elements. They gave us unique, dynamic camera angles.

Another concept that really stood out from a few years ago involved custom, lightweight VR glasses and a completely blank set that had markers placed around it. The idea was that when players put the glasses on, they were transported into a completely different world. On set, they might just be dribbling around the markers, but in post production, those markers became massive stone pylons rising out of the ground.

How is the Celtics organization taking advantage of the emergent creator economy? Have you seen value in the rise of the microinfluencer?
On the Celtics entertainment side, we work with a range of part-time staff, including our dancers, dunk team and promotions assistants. That ecosystem also extends to halftime performers and even national anthem singers. In many ways, these individuals are the microinfluencers you’re referring to. They come from diverse performance backgrounds and bring their own built-in followings. As they engage with our content and appear across our channels, including our dedicated Celtics Entertainment channel, their audiences start to engage with us as well, blending together.

In some cases, their followers might not have been basketball fans before. But through their connection to Celtics Entertainment, they’re introduced to the entertainment side of professional basketball. Since these performers come from such varied backgrounds, it’s been really interesting to watch those worlds come together.

“Vertical production” has been exploding, especially in the form of microdramas. Is this of interest to the Celtics?
In a way, we’re already operating in that style. Our entertainment is built around very tight timelines because everything is structured around TV timeouts. Each timeout gives us a fixed window. Sometimes it’s 60 seconds, sometimes it’s 90. And that’s all we have to capture attention and keep fans engaged before play resumes.

So within those constraints, we’re essentially creating our own version of microcontent or “microdramas.” We have to grab the audience right away, hold their attention and deliver something memorable before the clock runs out.

We host a media content day, when we film a variety of player features. These often include fun, quick-hit questions, once again going back to the “Rank your favorite pizza topping” segments. Our editors then turn that footage into short, high-energy videos that work both in-arena on the jumbotron and across social media.

What’s been especially effective is how relatable these moments are. Fans see players as larger than life on the court, but these clips bring them down to Earth. For example, asking players about Boston traffic or which teammate would make the best Lucky gets fun, authentic responses. We’ve also done interactive segments like “Guess the pet,” where we show pictures of a player’s pet and fans have to guess who it is.

All of this fits into that quick, engaging, short-form style. Even our opening sequence, arguably the biggest moment of the pregame, has to fit within about two and a half minutes, including full player introductions, so everything we do is condensed, and we’re constantly looking for ways to pack as much energy and engagement as possible into those short windows.

What’s your vision of the future for immersive technology for fan engagement? Do you foresee further competition in the “attention economy”?
Seeing where we are right now, the possibilities are endless. The tools and options we currently have for fan engagement are things I never would have thought of in the past, so it will be exciting to see where the industry takes us.

Drones continue seeing good use in our storytelling. During our banner-raising and ring ceremony after the championship, we partnered with a company to create a continuous, one-shot video using a drone. It started outside the arena, moved up the escalators and through the concourse, then into the arena bowl, circling the banner as it was raised and capturing the championship rings. The result was a seamless, cinematic moment with no cuts, and the footage was unique and incredibly dramatic.

I’d love to find more ways to use that kind of approach outside of major, one-time moments like a banner-raising. It created something really memorable that will live on as part of the Celtics’ story. Beyond that, I’m really interested in how mixed reality will continue to evolve. We’re already seeing some amazing applications in broadcast and on social, and I’m looking forward to exploring how they could become part of the everyday in-arena experience.

Everyone knows the classic childhood game of tag (you’re it, by the way), but World Chase Tag has turned it into a professional sport. Suddenly, tag is less about the innocent chase and more of a showcase for athleticism and parkour. Though the sport has humble grassroots origins in London, it now reaches audiences worldwide, attracting hundreds of millions of views across social media and broadcast television.

postPerspective spoke with Loïc Ascarino, head of sports for World Chase Tag, who walked us through the tech and the tools that helped World Chase Tag establish itself in the competitive zeitgeist of live global sports.

World Chase Tag is an unusually fast-paced sport, with action unfolding in seconds. What production challenges did that create? How different is World Chase Tag from Blackmagic’s other sports broadcast initiatives?
The way we produce World Chase Tag has changed dramatically over the years. Early on, we worked with Tupelo and Gray TV in the US, who brought in the broadcast trucks and handled much of the production infrastructure. However, as the sport grew, we needed to build a more sustainable setup of our own. While Tupelo and Gray TV are still main investors in WCT, we’ve now moved on from using broadcast trucks to more agile setups with Blackmagic hardware. The equipment was accessible from a budget standpoint, and the learning curve was manageable for our staff. We started with ATEM systems, then we added HyperDeck recorders, brought in Cloud Store and began experimenting with Blackmagic’s replay technology as soon as the replay system matured.

The evolution of our production workflow has really gone hand in hand with the evolution of the sport itself.

How has new production technology changed the way World Chase Tag broadcasts its events?
I think it’s amazing what we’re able to pull off today. We have the huge trucks and expensive equipment, but we can also run our operation from a single laptop with OBS installed. Live production is getting cheaper and more accessible. You don’t need to manage as big of a team in order to run this sort of project, which is obviously a huge advantage for a young organization like us.

We’re very grateful for the tech that has made it possible for us to run our events. Otherwise, we just wouldn’t have had that choice. We wouldn’t have been able to broadcast our sports. We would have had to stick with what we used to rely on in the first few years of World Chase Tag, which was to prerecord everything and then spend weeks or months editing before finally sharing it online. But for any sport, the live experience beats everything. No one would come together to watch a football match two or three weeks after the game passed. You want to see the game as it’s unfolding. You want that excitement of not knowing what’s going to happen. It’s the story engine of sports.

Even with the live broadcast, World Chase Tag still emphasizes rapid-turnaround social media content. How important is it today for live-production workflows to support social-first publishing alongside broadcast deliverables?
Our sport was created about 10 years ago by two brothers in London who were just playing tag in their garden. From the very beginning, the goal was simple: Create something that’s just as exciting to watch as it is to play. I think that’s where we succeeded. Our chases last around 20 seconds, which makes them perfect for short-form content on platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts. A full match runs roughly 12 to 15 minutes, which works well for longer-form online viewing, while a complete TV broadcast program comes in at around 45 to 50 minutes. The format naturally scales across different platforms and audiences.

That said, the live stream remains the core of everything we do. Our social clips generate hundreds of millions of views, but the live experience is what makes the sport feel alive. That’s when fans get to experience the thrill of watching something unfold in real time. Live audiences are naturally smaller than the audiences that discover us through short-form content, but that’s where the magic of the sport really happens. You can watch highlights every day, but seeing a chase happen live instills all these feelings you can’t get anywhere else. The uncertainty, the adrenaline, the feeling that anything could happen… it’s just something else.

You also developed custom software that integrates with your hardware backbone.
Yes, Blackmagic is incredibly open. The APIs are accessible, which makes it relatively easy to build custom tools around the hardware and extend its capabilities to fit our specific needs.

We’ve developed two software platforms of our own. The first is called Squared, and it’s dedicated to managing the sport itself. Our referees use it to track scores and timing, trigger lighting cues and control various game elements. All of that information automatically generates graphics in real time, which are output through a Blackmagic UltraStudio and fed back into the production as key-and-fill graphics. The result is a highly automated workflow that makes live production much smoother.

We’ve also developed an ATEM logger for the larger ATEM switchers. It records everything happening within the production, allowing us to automatically generate timelines in Resolve, complete with the various graphic layers, upstream keys and downstream keys used during the broadcast. That integration saves us an enormous amount of time in post production. Instead of rebuilding an event from scratch after the live stream, we can start with a timeline that closely matches the finished program and simply refine any moments that need adjustment. What used to take weeks can now be completed far more efficiently.

The production balances 1080p live delivery with 4K acquisition for behind-the-scenes and social content. Do you see more organizations adopting hybrid-resolution workflows as they balance quality, bandwidth and cost considerations?
Definitely. The move to 4K for live broadcast is still quite steep. Once you start looking at video transmitters, vision mixers, replay systems and everything else in the chain, the costs increase significantly. That makes sense if you’re broadcasting something like the Champions League on television, but for us, our main audience is still watching online. Because of that, we don’t really feel the need to move our live broadcasts to 4K right now.

At the same time, everything we do is recorded internally in 4K, and a lot of our post work is done in 4K as well. That gives us more flexibility when we’re creating content beyond the live stream. We’re also shooting and editing for both vertical and horizontal formats. We produce content in 16×9 and 9×16 at the same time because today, you have to be everywhere. If you have the equipment and the crew, you need to take advantage of every platform available to you. You never know where the next wave of growth is going to come from, whether that’s investors, fans, people discovering the sport or new athletes getting involved. That’s why we try to hit every platform and every possible audience.

What cameras and other tools do you use?
It’s mostly Blackmagic, but other notable suppliers are Sony (A7IV, FX3), GoPros (crashcams around the Quad) and Yamaha (sound consoles DM3, DM5). For editing, we work mostly from Apple Silicon stations (M1 Max, M3 Ultra).

World Chase Tag distributes content across more than 35 countries in multiple languages. How are you thinking about scalability for organizations that need to manage increasingly global and multi-lingual content operations?
Our focus is on reaching audiences wherever they are. Our events are distributed on YouTube; through broadcast partners in the United States, such as Creator TV Sports; and across a range of social media and streaming platforms in other markets. We’re also active on Chinese platforms because we have a large following in China, with a strong presence there and teams competing at the highest level.

One of the challenges is that every market is different. The Chinese internet ecosystem is very different from what you see in Europe or the US. The platforms are different, audience expectations are different, and the way content is distributed is different. We have to think about all of those factors when planning how we get our content in front of viewers.

We’re still at the beginning of that journey. This is only the second World Championship that we’ve produced as a live event, even though we run qualifying events throughout the year. Managing the entire workflow ourselves and distributing content across multiple platforms and markets is still a relatively new process for us, but the goal is simple: Make sure we’re available on every screen where fans want to watch.

World Chase Tag is a relatively new sport that has built a substantial audience through digital platforms. What trends do you see among these newer media organizations?
I think AI is bringing a lot to the table right now. When it comes to improving replay workflows, automating time-consuming processes or helping create small software tools for specific production needs, we’ve definitely started to see the impact it can have. We’re paying very close attention to it and experimenting with anything that could improve the experience for fans, enhance the event for people in the venue or simply make life easier for the production team.

I imagine a lot of companies will be adding AI to their product lines over the next few years, sometimes because it’s genuinely useful, and sometimes because it’s a marketing buzzword. Either way, it’s going to be an important area to watch. More broadly, I think newer organizations have to be agile. The world moves fast, and technology moves even faster. You need to be willing to experiment, try new products and find out what works for your particular workflow instead of relying exclusively on technologies that have already been proven.

Of course, you still need stability and reliability in your production environment. There’s always a place for established tools and proven workflows.

Looking at the overall workflow, from acquisition and live switching to replay, post production and distribution, it feels increasingly unified. Is the industry moving toward a future where the distinctions between live production and post production largely disappear?
I don’t know how much of the industry is moving in that direction, but it’s definitely the approach we’re taking at World Chase Tag. For example, one of the reasons we chose Blackmagic Replay instead of something like EVS was cost and accessibility. EVS is simply beyond our budget at the moment. But just as important is the way the different parts of the Blackmagic ecosystem work together. Because everything is connected, the entire production workflow becomes much smoother. The systems integrate well, there are fewer points of failure, and moving from live production into post is far more seamless.

In most cases, we’re simply refining what was created during the live stream, making small adjustments, fixing any moments that didn’t go quite as planned and preparing the final version. That saves us an enormous amount of time compared with traditional post production workflows.

Main Celtics Image Credit: David Butler II-Imagn Images

Jake Bourke is a screenwriter based in Boston. His focus is on short-form episodic television and original pilots. Check out his site here.