TL;DR: Super Bowl LX needed 700+ crew and 12 months of planning for five and a half hours of pregame at 6 locations. FIFA 2026 covers 104 matches across 3 countries. At this scale, the show lives or dies on one thing: can the whole team work off the same rundown before the game, during it, and after? Large live sports broadcast productions don't break because of bad tech or infrastructure. They break because coordination is often the biggest curveball. And the answer is standardization.
When NBC broadcast Super Bowl LX in February 2026, they deployed 700+ personnel, 149 cameras, and 130 microphones at one venue, in one city, for one broadcast. That planning cycle started 12 months earlier.
Now multiply that across a FIFA World Cup: 104 matches, 48 teams, 16 venues across 3 countries and 4 time zones. That included hundreds of production teams, dozens of broadcast partners, and one master feed, adapted locally by every rights holder in every territory.
From an infrastructure standpoint, the story is clearer than that of live production coordination pre-, during, and post-show.
The problem isn't the signal. It's the shared plan.
Every venue connects to the same International Broadcast Centre (IBC). The tech is not the thing that breaks usually; it’s the human layer. Events that stretch across three of the world’s largest countries, four time zones and 104 matches aren’t easy to coordinate. As FIFA's Head of Host Broadcast Production, Oscar Sanchez, put it:
“This makes the FIFA World Cup 2026 one of the biggest challenges a team has tackled historically when it comes to sports production.”
And his answer is standardization.
“We need to have a standardized feed that everybody’s going to be able to take and customize as they want.”
One shared foundation where every broadcaster adapts it to their audiences. The same logic applies to the rundown.
The breakdown in coordination starts quietly, when someone exports the rundown to a spreadsheet and sends it to the remote team. Then another file appears for a different venue, rundowns get copied and sent around, and when the new version appears, the same cycle needs to be repeated. The human factor plays a big role in this – it’s hard to avoid errors when there is little alignment between teams, departments, and venues.
The cost is losing a single source of truth. Small differences between rundown versions can have a dramatic impact on the broadcast. People start coordinating 'different events' without even noticing.
Keeping every broadcast phase in sync is the hardest part
Every part of the broadcast is difficult – pre-game build, the live action, and post-game wrap. Pre- and post-shows are generative – every cue, segment and timing is an editorial decision run by producers, not dictated by the game structure. What breaks is usually not any of these phases, but managing them and coordinating producers, directors, graphics operators, remote crews, and studio teams, making sure they’re all moving off the same plan.
Think about NBC’s Super Bowl LX pregame and what it involved: five and a half hours of live pregame programming across six locations, live halftime segments, and the postgame trophy presentation.
Pierre Moossa, director of the Super Bowl pregame show coverage, said it well:
“What most people don't realize about any sports production is how many people it takes for a show to be successful. Preparation takes 12 months, and it’s a collective effort that everybody puts together.”
That's the live sports broadcast production challenge, keeping everyone on the same page during those 12 months: pre-game, in-game, and post-game alike.
What if you ran a show like this on Cuez?
Let’s take NBC’s Super Bowl LX pregame as an example: a five and a half hour of live pregame programming across six locations, live halftime segments, and the postgame trophy presentation. Now imagine running that on Cuez Rundown. The pre-game plan, the studio segments, and the post-game analysis would all exist within one running order instead of multiple scattered documents. All teams could see the latest rundown version, across all devices, without waiting for the next printed version. Think of it as a shared Google Doc built specifically for broadcast, with everyone working on it at the same time.
That same goes for live match coverage. Sports productions running on Cuez already use floating items this way: two blocks prepped in the rundown, one for each possible outcome: where Team A wins, or Team B wins, sitting ready before the result is even known. The moment the match ends, the producer floats out the block that didn't happen, and the winner's segment is live on screen instantly.
As the FIFA World Cup demonstrated, software-first and decentralized production can operate at a global scale. And that doesn’t only apply to global events. The principles work for both 16 venues in 3 countries and 2 studios in the same city.
That's the model Cuez Rundown is built around. The scalability is key here. With a single source of truth, adding more people to a show reduces coordination risk instead of multiplying it.
Sports teams are using Cuez today for exactly this. Worth thinking about what it could do for your operations.
What this means for your next live broadcast
NBC’s Director of Remote Technical Operations, Matt Hogencamp, said:
“We have a plan. But also, we know there’s going to be curveballs coming at us.”
The question is: can your broadcast rundown software absorb them? If a segment changes, does every operator see it instantly, or do you spend the next 10 minutes chasing people down?
A live, connected rundown that pushes updates to every device is what makes the difference between productions that handle curveballs and those that don’t.
That's what Cuez Rundown is built for.
Interested in how Cuez handles live sports broadcast production at scale?
Ecaterina Caprari
Content Marketeer