SPEED SPORT streaming affiliate Pit Row TV recently earned one of broadcasting’s most prestigious honors — a Telly Award.
The Telly Awards showcase the top television and video productions across multiple platforms, including social media, online streaming and live broadcasts.
Pit Row TV, known for streaming live racing events, including the CARS Tour, Southeast Super Trucks and other late model events, earned the Telly Award in Branded Content for last season’s CARS Tour broadcast from North Carolina’s Orange County Speedway.
Other winners in the category included Sony’s Crunchyroll, and Warner Brothers.
Tony Stevens, owner of Pit Row TV and voice of the CARS Tour, discussed the award-winning broadcast.
“At the time, that was the largest broadcast undertaking we had done,” Stevens said.” That was an eight-camera shoot with cameras in each corner, on the roof, a drone, a pit camera, pit talent, all kinds of different moving pieces. At the time, that was the biggest and most complex broadcast we had attempted to do. That’s the thing that to me stands out the most. Since then, that complexity has become almost standard for us, which is wild because it is so complex and there’s so much work involved.”
The amount of work that goes into a typical broadcast begins long before show time.
“On our given weekend, we’re usually there about 48 to 60 hours before the green flag,” Stevens said. “Setting everything up, doing what we’ve got to do. Whether it’s gathering content, setting up the equipment and the cables, engineering everything we have to do. It’s a good two or three days of work to actually get to the point that we push the button and say, ‘Hi we’re on the air.’”
Despite the multitude of hours that are necessary to reach the starting line of beginning the broadcast, Stevens’ confidence in his team beams. He certainly wasn’t surprised the team’s efforts earned a Telly Award.
“I have the utmost pride and confidence in our team, to where they deserve to win something like this,” Stevens said. “I fully expected them to produce something of this caliber. For them to get an award that matches my opinion of their product every week we do a broadcast of that scale, just validates what I’ve told everybody for years. That is, we’ve got the best crew in grassroots motorsports broadcasting. I would put them up against anybody, any day of the week.”
Stevens acknowledged he gets inspiration for Pit Row TV productions by viewing national broadcasts of auto racing such as NASCAR and IndyCar.
“That sets the standard for how people expect to consume a sporting broadcast,” Stevens said. “That basically is what you look at and go ‘how can we be as close to that as possible and still put our own spin on it?’ Put our own style, our own flavor to it, but continue to strive towards that level. Ultimately, that’s what we did for that. We went back and looked, we surveyed the place, figured out where we can put cameras, and how is this all going to work logistically, how is the tech going to work?
“We knew to make sure the camera in turn three can hear the director and vice versa,” Stevens continued. “There are so many of those little things, even so much down to ‘where do we put everything?’ One of the biggest things at this level is, unlike FOX, we don’t have 10 production trucks on the site, and just wheel out a bunch of cable and cameras and put them up and go. We don’t have that luxury of having everything contained where it’s the same every week.”
Not having the luxury that top-level broadcasts have, also presents challenges.
“We basically have to build a control room at every race track we go to,” Stevens said. “That means every week, somebody’s in a different place, or something comes in a different way. The biggest thing we run into is wiring scenarios at race tracks, where somebody’s wired a building wrong, or it’s decayed over time to where it doesn’t have a proper ground anymore.
“There are all those different challenges to try and make all those things work, and that’s part of why we get there when we do, to make sure we iron all those things out.”
When a broadcast concludes, the ironing-out process starts all over again for the next show.
“We always debrief every show,” Stevens said. “We try and figure out what went right, what went wrong, what can we improve on. To share all that with them and kind of give them a little bit of an ownership stake, in what’s going on, whether that’s just from a creative standpoint or whatever, they take a lot of pride in that. Then obviously seeing that feedback helps.
“Now you’ve had industry leaders, and industry experts that say, ‘Look, this absolutely was a great thing.’ I think it gives them the confidence now, that it’s just not me saying that and people around them saying that. These are people that have no idea who they are, or what we do. Looking at it and going, ‘Yeah, that was pretty doggone good.’”
Pit Row TV’s award-winning broadcast from Orange County Speedway as well as programming from other affiliates can be viewed on SPEEDSPORT.tv.