By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director, Sports Video Group
Tuesday, September 2, 2025
The 2025 US Open championship is entering its final stages, and as usual there are some innovations designed to improve the coverage for tennis fans around the world. But this year is also the end of one era and the beginning of a new one as ESPN’s role as host broadcaster ends and the USTA gears up to take over host in 2026. And in many respects, there is a two-pronged effort this year with a focus on this year and then an eye on 2026.
“We always wanted to try to bring in a couple new things, but this year is slightly different because ESPN is working on their plans to for domestic coverage next year while we’re working on host plans,” says Petro Mnych, USTA, Director, Broadcast Technical Operations. “This year is very much just trying out a few little things and really the bulk of this year is getting the HBS team up to speed across everything and looking at every camera position and figuring out exactly what our footprint will be next year. Ultimately the hope is that in 2026 rights holders get the same quality tennis production but with some incremental improvements.”
There are two major innovations this year: a new tethered drone from Proximavision capturing new aerials and the deployment of a new camera platform in Ashe Stadium that provides railcam-style coverage without the need for a rail or a traditional camera. The system is a strip of camera lenses and sensors that is three inches deep and 2.5-inches tall and can be multiple meters long with lenses and sensors spaced out a few inches apart. An operator with a videogame controller can then scroll left to right among the various sensors and deliver the equivalent of a railcam shot but in a much smaller and more discrete form factor.
“We have two 16-meters-long sections of camera arrays on Ashe Stadium, and it essentially offers full-court coverage of players and the ability to do some nice tracking pan shots along the side of the court that we’ve never had before,” says Mnych. “It took us about a week to dial the system in, and it just looks like it’s part of the LED wall on the side of the court. It’s been working nicely and gets a better angle than camera three or four for things like following the players from their seat to the baseline as you can see their face because it’s more head on.”
As for the Proximavision drone, the AirReady tethered drone can capture video at resolutions up to 4K from up to 400 feet. And because its tethered it can fly for hours (if not days) at a time without the need to return to earth for a battery change.
“Getting all the permissions and permits here is no small feat given the airports, homeland security, and various departments of the NYPD but we got them completed and it’s been great,” adds Mnych. “It offers an angle that we’ve never had before from the southeast side of the venue and production is happy with it. Also, the pictures look really great near dusk as you see the sun coming down behind Manhattan and it’s a really nice shot of the cityscape.”
This year’s US Open is also the second that has featured HDR coverage with the HLG format and the BBC LUT used natively across the primary show courts with all the outside courts up-LuTed. There is also Dolby Atmos coverage from Ashe Stadium and Armstrong Stadium.
“In 2026 we’ll be a full 1080p HDR with HDR across all of the courts,” says Mnych. “But for this year it was rinse and repeat from last year and then next year it’s how do we make everything more compelling.”
Along with the technology changes this year were some changes to the actual event. First, the tournament started on a Sunday instead of a Monday and the mixed doubles tournament was played during Fan Week on August 19-20. Both of those changes meant the production operations for Arthur Ashe Stadium and Armstrong Stadium had to be up and running earlier than usual.
“It definitely brought the main-draw buzz to the event earlier than usual, it looked great, and the stands were full,” says Mnych. “And when we got to Sunday the galleries were already battle tested.”
Now that the US Open hits its final week the challenge is making sure everyone involved in the production is re-energized and taking breaks to ensure mental health is maintained ahead of the semifinals and finals later this week.
“Now’s the time to try and given everybody a breath as much as we like to pretend that sometimes we’re not human and that we can just keep going there’s always that day or that moment where you just need to take a break,” adds Mnych.
Testing for Next Year
With respect to preparations for next year, the USTA has undertaken tests of a couple of technologies to see if they can have a possible role within the 2026 production workflow. For example, the USTA has tested out Red Digital Cinema Komodo systems to see if they could be used for actual court coverage.
“We’ve tested them at the slash and camera one position in Ashe, and the camera operators said it worked similar to regular hard cameras but that they saw more detail and crisper images when they would zoom in,” says Mnych.
The USTA is also testing out some new audio processing with Edge Sound Research.
“We’re also doing a test with ESR using our existing microphone complement coupled with athlete tracking data to try and see what they can potentially deliver with respect to sound design like offering player ISO where we can remove all the crowd noise,” says Mnych. “The initial tests from that are pretty good and for post-production work it could be really interesting.”
And while there is still plenty of decision making to be made for next year (including choosing the facility and technology provider or providers for the host production) Mnych says the past few weeks have gotten both the USTA and the HBS team into a good position to finalize plans for next year.
“HBS have been really good to work with and very responsive they’re very buttoned up and approach things methodically,” he says. “And then in this final we still work closely with NEP, Gravity Media, Hawkeye, SMT, and others working together on the production side and then others like Veritone and ThumbWar across the media and asset management side of things. It’s a very collaborative process and that isn’t always the case as there are plenty of events that only have one vendor as opposed to 10 or 12 different ones. We have some really, good people here from all sides of the vendors that really help everything kind of come together. And our hope is with HBS coming in and us moving to host that everything just continues to get better and we keep the good mix of people, resources, and assets that help us pull off what is now a three-week event.”
Next year will be filled with plenty of changes as well as new faces mixing in with the old. But the US Open will continue to be an event that brings in the best minds in tennis production and operations from around the globe and across the U.S.
“We are looking forward to working closely with ESPN on the start of our long term renewel and excited to see how they will be elevating their domestic and international productions,” says Mnych.
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