Brad Feldman is the supervising producer for all New England Revolution telecasts and has featured prominently as the play-by-play announcer for the past eight years of his 12-year broadcasting career with the team. Besides his MLS work, now on Comcast SportsNet New England (CSNNE), Feldman, employed by Kraft Sports Productions, previously called international matches between 2002-2007.
Feldman holds degrees from the Johns Hopkins University (B.A.), the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (M.S.) and Northeastern University (MBA).
Feldman spoke with me about broadcasting MLS in the United States, his career with the New England Revolution, new Revolution color analyst Jeff Causey and what viewers can expect to see in the new NBC coverage of MLS in 2012.
Part 1 [Click here for Part 2]
LE: What changes in production can viewers expect with NBC broadcasting MLS instead of Fox this season?
Feldman: The idea of using Arlo White is interesting in a good way. My understanding is that he’s going to be more of an old-school, English-style play-by-play commentator and he won’t have a color guy with him in the booth. The color announcer will be on the field, but I don’t understand the mechanics of exactly how it will work. It’s a lot easier to play off another person if you’re right next to each other because you can see him out of the corner of your eye and read the body language.
In England and here they’ve gone to using mostly ex-players or coaches as color announcers in the last ten years. In the old days when they had the play-by-play guy doing the whole thing, there wasn’t a color commentator - there would probably be a pitch-side reporter they’d go to once or twice a half. I’m not exactly certain how they’re going to manage it, but if anybody can do it, it’s Arlo. He’s a very smooth customer, good energy, low ego - he’ll be a good guy for the job.
As for production, I’d be shocked if it were materially different in terms of covering the play, but how they’re structuring their shows, I’m not privy to that.
The League producer they’ve hired, Shaw Brown, is a guy we used a lot and I have a lot of respect for. He’s going to be the guy in the truck. He’s worked on ESPN’s World Cup coverage, done games for Fox Soccer Channel and ESPN and he’s been a part of MLS TV for 15 -20 years. He produced USA-Venezuela for ESPN3 the other night, he did a majority of the Fox Soccer Channel games last year, and he’s been one of our lead producers when he doesn’t have conflicts. He’s a real hard core soccer guy. Whereas most people are pigeonholed into one job, Shaw can do everything from field produce, be on-the-field spotter and be lead producer for an international match, so he’s personal, knowledgeable about the sport. He was born in England and moved to Michigan as a kid, so he gets both the American side of things and also the world’s game side.
LE: One of the biggest challenges of broadcasting MLS is the diverse viewership. You have your MLS fans, international league fans, national team fans, women’s soccer fans, general sports fans and youth soccer fans. Who are the announcers talking to?
Feldman: Good question. I think that’s evolving. When I first came in, in the late 90s, there still was a mentality that you needed to educate the viewers about basics like technique and the laws of the game. Now, there’s a universal presumption that people know the sport, but there are still instances where the laws of the game are not completely clear. The idea of being passive in an offside situation is something that we may all go to our graves disagreeing over, so there are definitely points worthy of discussing. We don’t assume that everybody knows everything, but we’re generally speaking to an informed fan, not necessarily a hard core fan, which is the way that most of the sports announcers in the other American sports treat their audience too.
LE: You appear on the Revolution’s home telecast for 31 games this year and your call will be broadcast nationally through Direct Kick and streamed through MatchDay Live, right?
Feldman: Not every one, it’s a complicated formula. They don’t pick it based on what team or which announcer they like better, it has more to do with the logistics of getting the transmission into their system. Direct Kick and MatchDay Live use different means for doing that, so it might be more cost-effective for MatchDay Live to take us off of a particular satellite, whereas Direct Kick may be using a different one.
Sometimes people think there’s preferential treatment based on a particular team, but it has a lot more to do with who’s using fiber optic transmission versus satellite and things like which network you’re on. If you’re on an over-the-air channel, like when we were on TV 38, we didn’t get picked up as often as we do on Comcast SportsNet. As we do 31 games, I’d guess off the top of my head that 20-22 would be on Direct Kick and a few more on MatchDay Live.
MatchDay Live is great if you’re a Mac person, you can get all the games in HD through MatchDay Live on your television.
LE: How are the ratings for your local broadcast?
Feldman: Because it’s a cable network, the ratings tend to be low. As soon as we moved over from TV 38 to Comcast SportsNet New England, they went down in the range of 50%, but that’s because not everybody gets cable, whereas TV 38 is over the air. But that’s true of any programming - a terrestrial network even in the digital age gets more households. But the difference is TV 38 isn’t available throughout New England and we can’t get a composite rating, so we’ve never been able to see a rating that includes Western Mass, northern Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, areas of Maine, so we’re probably seen by way more households in New England now that we’re on Comcast SportsNet New England. If you took where we were in ‘07, ‘08 and cut that in half, that’s probably what we rate most weeks. And if you’re on at 11 p.m. at San Jose, there’s not a lot of people watching, but an October game at 7:30, we tend to do pretty well, especially in the 18-34 year old demo.
LE: The broadcast quality on Comcast SportsNet seems better than TV 38.
Feldman: A big part of that is HD. It’s the same producers, the same techs at home games and we tend to get very good people. But we’re at the mercy of the technical people in some of these other markets so it can be a challenge. It’s not that we can’t find people that know soccer, but say we’re at San Jose and if there are seven other pro and major sporting events there, particularly on Saturday, and the Earthquakes are doing their own home telecast, we’re not going to get the "A" team. And even if they wanted to work, they couldn’t, right? Let’s say you’re a very good cameraman and the Red Sox have a three-day home stand at Fenway. Would you rather get one day’s work and fly to Kansas City and do a game for the Revs or would you rather stay at home and get three days of work at a Major League Baseball game. It’s just tough.
ESPN has the budget to travel their own people in for most of the positions for most of their shows, but it really increases the costs if you start flying in all your techs.
LE: Walk me through your game day routine.
Feldman: My game day routine is probably different than any other announcer in the League because to my knowledge, there’s no other announcer who’s in the production role that I’m in.
On game day I like to be there about the time the TV trucks arrive to let the tech manager who oversees the crew and the producer into Kraft Sports offices and make sure the security, truck drivers and engineers are there. Say it’s a 7:30 pm game, I’m there at noonish and once everybody is sorted out, I go in my office, turn on an English game in the background, finish all my homework, charts and notes for the game and then try to get a workout. That’s the time things get real busy around the stadium, so I put out production fires, then I have a production meeting at the meal upstairs in the pressroom with DA [Damon Amendolara] and the color guy and the producer and director.
Then we go into the wind tunnel of production where the color announcer goes down and does the pre-game interview with a player and the coach for the Revs. I go upstairs and we pre-record the opening segment. Then the two-hour game passes – last year it felt longer, but usually it feels like 15-20 minutes in my mind, but it’s really two hours.
The we go downstairs and do Revs Wrap, which means that we don’t get out of the booth for another 20 minutes, and then I go downstairs and although it’s not my job I make sure everybody who are supposed to, gets the DVDs – the coaches, the refs. For a 7:30 game I’m usually done at 10:15 or 10:30. A busy day, but I love it.
Continue reading Part 2, about chemistry in the broadcast booth.
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