— Pat McAfee (@PatMcAfeeShow) October 28, 2024 Should the leagues or individual franchises take the initiative and make the cameras available? Or mandate it to the networks? Some say yes. “There are certain areas of the field – most notably the goal line and the rest of the end zone – where the league needs to take responsibility for providing the equipment to capture the angles needed to make definitive calls on scoring plays,” said Brandon Costa, the Digital Director of Sports Video Group. “It’s unfair, in my opinion, that so much of the responsibility of having the right cameras in the right places falls on the broadcaster. Other well-known elements like Video Assistant Referee (VAR) in the FIFA World Cup or the Premier League or Hawkeye in a Grand Slam tennis tournament are infrastructures established in the venues by the governing bodies. “The technology is available and the standard has been established for how video can best support the officiating of the NFL game, but not every game can be covered by a broadcaster with the resources of a playoff game or even a regular season prime-time game. This is an issue not exclusive to the NFL in the United States but in this day and age for the biggest league in the country to have an inequity in the ability to properly officiate a game based on what equipment the game broadcaster brought to cover the game is, in my opinion, no longer acceptable.” The majority of people we spoke with think networks should be installing the cameras themselves but also believe the lack of a standard falls at the feet of the NFL. “If the NFL relies so much on these camera angles for replay, why aren’t they helping with the financial burden?” asked one source. “You know the answer to that.” Awful Announcing did learn that the NFL did increase minimum production standards (including cameras) as part of their last broadcast deals, but this seemed to not specifically include pylon cams. How Much Does It Actually Cost? How much the networks and leagues save by not requiring pylon cams was hard to pin down. The closest thing we got to a number was one source saying “It’s more than you think but it’s still pennies for the networks and the NFL.” Still, we did learn a lot about the history of pylon cams. Pylon cams started about a decade ago with ESPN developing a version and a company called Admiral Video releasing its own version. The first Super Bowl to use pylon cams was Super Bowl 50 in 2016 on CBS (Broncos vs. Panthers). Not long after, they started to get rolled out to more broadcasts and quickly became commonplace to the point where many watching a home were confused as to why there wasn’t one being used in that Falcons-Buccaneers game. While Admiral was the early provider of most pylon cams initially, other larger companies have invested in the space. At some point. Admiral soured on the technology due to “liability concerns” and now their website calls them “terrible” and says the patents are for sale (though they apparently helped the owner buy “a nice boat”). These days, pylon cams and first-down markers are commonplace, not just in the NFL but in college football as well. The two companies that seem to own this space are C360 (now owned by COSM), which ESPN rolled out for the College Football Playoff in 2016, and NEP, whose cameras are used by CBS, NBC, and ESPN, the latter of which uses 7-10 pylon cam sets for college games each week. If you’re wondering how ESPN can afford 7-1o sets for college football but other networks can’t for the NFL, there seems to be a good answer: Sponsorship. ESPN sold pylon cam sponsorship to brands to help cover the costs. Sean McDonough making sure ESPN gets that Progressive 💰 pic.twitter.com/vOmC7ENoo2