The Free Broadcasting Class That Beats Most Universities
You can learn from this video even if you are a veteran in our industry.
500 people. Five and a half hours. 124.9 million viewers.
And NBC Academy just put the playbook on YouTube for free.
I have been in broadcasting for 27 years. This is the most useful twenty minutes I have spent on a video about our industry in a long time. You need to see it. So does every person you know who is trying to break in.
Why this video is rare
If you want to be a lawyer, you have shelves of jurisprudence. If you want to be a doctor, textbooks the size of bricks. If you want to be a producer or a director on a live show, you have almost nothing.
The technical side has caught up. 2110, Dante, the engineering material is real. But the rest of what we do, the live production craft, we still learn the way I did. Standing next to someone who knew, watching what they did, and being too embarrassed to ask why.
That is what makes this NBCU Academy video so rare.
It is called How an NBC Sports Super Bowl Show Gets Made. Twenty minutes. Free.
It walks you through the production of the pre-game show for the 2026 Super Bowl. The most-watched broadcast in NBCUniversal’s history. 124.9 million viewers on average. A 5 1/2-hour show. Over 500 staff and contractors. Months of planning.
And the video walks you through it role by role. The director, Pierre Moossa. The producer, Matt Casey. The director of remote technical operations, Matt Hogencamp. The director of operations, Laura Cronin. You watch them do site surveys at Alcatraz. You watch them block cameras. You watch them finalize the rundown. You sit in the format meeting where everyone, from the talent to the audio team, gets on the same page.
I have been doing this for 27 years and I learned things from it. I cannot imagine what a 19-year-old taking their first production class would take away.
Why this matters more than it looks
I started in broadcasting in Costa Rica in 1999. I went to university. The classes were theoretical. Names, dates, equipment lists I would never touch.
I learned almost nothing about live production until I walked into the university’s TV station (Canal 15) to work for a show called “Musica por Inclusion or MXI” (Music for Inclusion is the literal translation).
That is when broadcasting got real. I saw an editor make decisions I had only read about. I watched a camera operator (Geovanny) hold a frame for thirty seconds because the talent was about to deliver a line and a wide shot would have killed it. I learned what an audio mixer actually does in the room when something goes wrong, which is most of the time.
Nothing in the classroom prepared me for any of that. The TV station did. Nine months at Canal 15 was worth four years of theory.
Most kids outside of the USA who want to enter our industry do not have a TV station to walk into. Most universities do not run one. And the ones that do can only show you what their school does, at their school’s scale, with their school’s budget.
This NBCU Academy video shows them what a Super Bowl pre-game show looks like from the inside. Not the polish of marketing. The rhythm of the actual workflow. The site survey. The rundown. The camera meeting. The full-format meeting. The runthrough with talent.
The director of the broadcast, Pierre Moossa, says it best in the video:
“What most people don’t realize about any sports production, as small or as big as the Super Bowl, is how many people it takes for a show to be successful. No matter your role, you can have an incredible impact on the broadcast.”
That line should be on a poster in every broadcasting program in the world.
Twenty minutes of this video is worth a semester of theory. I am not exaggerating. If you teach broadcasting at any university anywhere, this should be assigned viewing in the first week of class.
A short list to bookmark
If you find this kind of resource as useful as I do, here is a starting set. None of these existed when I was learning. All of them are free.
NBCU Academy on YouTube. Production deep dives, role explanations, executive interviews. The video above is a great place to start.
SVG (Sports Video Group) on the web. Industry-grade reporting on the production side of sports broadcasting. The newsletter is essential.
Your nearest university TV station, college radio station, or community broadcast operation. If they will let you stand in the room, that is still the best classroom we have.
One ask
Forward this to a young person who is trying to break into our industry and does not know where to start. The NBCU video alone might change how they think about a career in production.
If you teach broadcasting, send it to your students this week.
If you hire broadcasters, watch it yourself. It will sharpen the questions you ask in interviews.
We do not have enough resources like this. The way more get made is by making sure the ones that already exist actually get watched.
The link is right there. Twenty minutes. Press play.
Bulletin board
You watched the NBCU video and thought, “I want to actually work on productions like this one day.”
Here is your next move.
My course, The Global Business of Live Sports Production, is the field guide for the industry that video shows you. Who is actually calling the shots on the biggest sporting events in the world. How their crew lists get built. How to get on those lists. Twenty-seven years of inside knowledge, organized so you can use it tomorrow morning, not someday.
63 broadcasting professionals have already gone through it.
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