A record number of viewers could tune in to watch the Premier League on Saturday night and the majority will be exposed to fake crowd noise for the first time when Bournemouth take on Crystal Palace.
One of the stipulations of the Premier League being allowed to resume while the rest of the country remains under a level of lockdown is that all games will be played behind closed doors with a maximum of 300 essential staff inside the stadium.
Broadcasters have already had to deal with the eerie atmospheric conditions in the Bundesliga, where host TV companies began to experiment with fake crowd noise.
Sky Sports and BT Sport have followed suit this week as English football has come back and the BBC have said that they will also have engineered sound as a default option.
“We decided to make a really late call on this,” Slater told the Daily Mail.
“We have taken lots of feedback from our talent and much more widely, and there is a broad consensus that actually some sound enhancement makes it a better viewing experience.”
On BBC One, commentator Steve Wilson and summariser Jermaine Jenas will be accompanied by a bespoke simulation of the crowd at the Vitality Stadium but viewers will be able to “switch off” the crowd via the red button or by watch on iPlayer.
Sky have been adding the noises, which have been created in conjunction with EA who make the Fifa video game series, to their Main Event coverage with fans able to switch to the Premier League channel where the game is shown “as is”.
BT have also been offering the “au naturelle” coverage of games as the option rather than the main selection, with their extra channels providing the crowd noise-free games, although the broadcaster are confident that most will choose for the noisier option.
“We are working with the Premier League and EA Sports to create bespoke crowd noise for individual matches that we are covering,” head of BT Sport Simon Green told i earlier this month.
“It will be different and I would hope an improvement on what we were able to get from Germany because we are in control of it in a way that we weren’t when it was fed to us from overseas.
“We’ve learned a little bit from what we put to air last weekend, and we’ve learned how our public and our viewers feel about it.”
More on the Premier League
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- Why players and managers are not wearing coronavirus masks
- A warning for fans: Games could be moved to neutral venues if crowds gather
- From world-beater at Liverpool to a failure at Barça, Newcastle may be Coutinho’s only hope
- Exclusive: Heskey talks Sterling, racism and doing an internship at 42
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/2zNCgLp
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