Whisper and the Fédération Française de Tennis (FFT) have scaled their remote production workflow for the 2026 French Open, utilizing a London-based hub to manage 231 staff and provide feeds for 28 broadcast partners. The production update includes new curated behind-the-scenes content and expanded camera and replay infrastructure across the tournament courts.
The shift toward centralized remote production allows major sporting events to expand content offerings—like the new 'Inside Roland Garros' feed—without increasing the physical burden on venue infrastructure. By maintaining core hardware on-site while offloading 26% of the workforce to a London hub, Whisper demonstrates a hybrid model that prioritizes low latency and signal reliability for global rightsholders. This approach reflects a broader industry trend where production companies use remote connectivity to manage rising camera counts and data-heavy 1080p/UHD HDR workflows. For the streaming ecosystem, this indicates that the bottleneck for premium live content is moving from physical space to network bandwidth and equipment orchestration. Watch for whether other Grand Slams adopt similar high-redundancy, remote-heavy frameworks to manage multi-court scaling.
The 2026 production marks the second year of Whisper’s five-year host broadcasting contract with the FFT, which runs through 2029. Per TM Broadcast (September 2024), Whisper replaced the FFT's previous in-house production model, which had been in place since 2021. This partnership coincided with a period of rapid financial growth for Whisper; the company returned to private ownership in March 2026 after Sony Pictures Television divested its 30% stake. During the five-year Sony partnership, Whisper’s revenue grew 500% to approximately £100 million, according to Televisual (March 2026).
Broadcasting rights for the tournament remain highly fragmented across global markets. In the domestic French market, rights are currently split between public broadcaster France Télévisions and Amazon Prime Video through 2027, as reported by Insider Sport (May 2026). Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) also solidified its long-term position, securing a 10-year US rights deal for the tournament worth $650 million that began in 2025. This deal places French Open coverage on TNT Sports and Max, ending decades of NBC Sports coverage. WBD also extended its European rights—excluding France—through 2030, per SportsPro (June 2025).
Technically, the tournament continues to serve as a showcase for EVS infrastructure. The XT-Via servers used in the 2026 production are part of a broader shift toward AI-assisted replay and automation. At NAB 2026, EVS demonstrated GenAI-powered deblurring and super slow-motion tools via its XtraMotion platform, which are increasingly integrated into major live sports workflows to enhance standard camera feeds, according to SVG Europe (March 2026). These advancements support the FFT's objective of delivering high-level data insights across all 16 match courts synchronously.
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