by jackjack » Sun Aug 12, 2012 2:16 pm
The production crew is a good portion of the expenses, but renting the television truck, equipment, and sending the game from the Fox office in Century City to the command center in the Woodlands, TX, collectively make up the majority of the cost. They actually have to book time to send it and it goes over a fiber line and it's pretty expensive. Not to mention the money paid to the graphics artists who make the PGF logo, all the score box graphics, etc. If it costs $90,000 to produce the game, it may be twice that to do it live. If it was live they'd have to rent a satellite truck to send the game via satellite to the command center and that is ridiculously expensive. In a game like this Fox probably didn't sell much ad time, so yes, we are probably lucky it was televised. Hopefully it keeps getting more and more popular and they can sell the ad time to make it worth it for them to televise it live.