Ammar Hina, Broadcast & TV production director at UAE Pro League, spoke at the online roundtable “Broadcasting 2022. UAE Pro League: vertical production, VR, AR and other 16:9 formats”.

Ammar Hina (Moderator): TKT Magazine is one of the oldest magazines in broadcast history. It is a platform that serves to shed more light on the happenings in the broadcast industry. More recently, we have been focusing more on the technological aspects of broadcasting and personally, this area is quite important to me because I have been part of the UAE Pro-League for the last six years. My name is Ammar Hina. I would be taking on the role of a moderator and as we move on, I would do my uttermost to highlight the events behind the scenes with everyone.

I remember in 2016, I discussed with the team the idea of going with virtual reality in football. And one of the guys said to me “You are crazy, this will never happen with football!” Eighteen months after that, we were the first football platform worldwide to implement virtual technology telecasting. And the same guy came to me after that and said “I told you that you were crazy.”

I would like to give a brief introduction to the Pro League. UAE Pro League was established in 2007 but from the broadcast side, the department was established in the year 2015. And in this last seven years, the League has developed to be the first league worldwide to ever telecast in virtual reality, the first league in Asia to implement VAR systems, augmented reality mixed with drones, immersive technologies, player’s point of view with replays; its a bulk of everything, 4K productions; its the first football league in the Arabic world to stream bilingual content digitally. The growth of the League has expanded to much more than the technological aspect. For instance, in the aspects of content distribution, it’s the first Arab league to ever have a female English commentator. With special cameras, buggy cams, sky cams, virtual, audio cheering, mobile device, and special vertical productions, the League is an intricate system of elements far beyond 16*9 or even football.