Hopefully it never comes to this with the Cleveland Browns or the NFL, but if the team is forced to play in an empty stadium, it won’t be without noise for the fans watching at home. According to the Sports Business Journal, the broadcast networks have decided that they will inject artificial crowd noise into the telecast.
It might be crowd noise that the players on the field, or court or ice, could also hear while they’re competing. Or it could be a musical score or a sports version of a laugh track, based on what SBJ’s John Ourand heard from network producers.
“We are looking at more than just pumping in audio,” said Brad Zager, Fox Sports’ executive producer, executive vice president and head of production and operations. “We’re looking at trying to figure out how to score a game live. How do we make sure that we have something that sounds authentic?”
For a cavernous outdoor facility like FirstEnergy Stadium, the thought of hearing artificial crowd noise during a game seems very strange. Also, would the team be allowed to increase the volume when the opposing team has the ball, or in critical situations? There are a lot of kinks to get worked out for this (hopefully) hypothetical situation.
