Sports

NFL Fans Really Did Not Like NBC’s ‘High Sky’ Super High-Angle Skycam On ‘Sunday Night Football’

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NFL Fans Did Not Like NBC Sunday Night Football High-Angle Skycam

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In 2018, as it always does, the NFL dominated the list of highest-rated prime time broadcasts. 18 of the top 30 shows in 2018 were NFL games.

So, naturally, because the NFL and people associated with the league just can’t leave well-enough alone, like NBC, this week’s Sunday Night Football broadcast between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Tennessee Titans featured extensive use of something called a “High Sky” camera as the primary viewing angle for the game.

According to ProFootballTalk.com, this was the second time a Steelers-Titans game was broadcast using the “High Sky” camera as the main camera angle for the broadcast as it was also used in the game between the teams in a 2017 regular season game.

In 2017, ESPN senior coordinating producer for college football Ed Placey said with the SkyCam “there are too many times when it has an inferior angle.”

Michael Davies, senior vice president of field and technical operations for Fox Sports, said about SkyCam, “It’s not a one-size fits all. I think there are certain plays and certain situations where it make sense to use the SkyCam live as your play-by-play, and there are certain times where cameras 1, 2 or 3 do a great job as well.”

An NBC spokesman said about their use of the SkyCam as a primary viewing angle in that 2017 game, “As we expected, there was a range of reaction as some fans have become accustomed to the traditional camera angles, while many others were excited to watch the game from a perspective that they’ve grown up with, but was new to television.”

By “range of reaction” he meant half of the people watching the game did not like it.

So, of course, NBC ignored all of that and tried it again in 2019.

Based on Twitter reactions, Sunday night might be the last time NBC will ever try this experiment.

https://twitter.com/Callipygiad/status/1165778163558944768

https://twitter.com/MattRobertsTV/status/1165780580094631937

Not even close.

Douglas Charles headshot avatar BroBible
Douglas Charles is a Senior Editor for BroBible with two decades of expertise writing about sports, science, and pop culture with a particular focus on the weird news and events that capture the internet's attention. He is a graduate from the University of Iowa.
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