Nielsen also estimates that 55.8 million total viewers watched all or part of CBS Sports’ U.S. Open Tennis Championships coverage over the course of the two-week tournament.  That 55.8 million total viewers was an increase of 24% from last year’s 44.9 million.

This year’s Men’s Final also earned an average national household rating/share of 2.3/5, up 35% from last year’s 1.7/4, which saw Federer defeat Andy Murray in three sets.

“Nobody in the world is going to commit a camera to feet the whole time,” says CBS Sports director Bob Fishman. “That would be ridiculous.”

The Hawk-Eye instant replay system is designed to track only the movement of the ball, and not the feet of a player (at least not yet), so that was no help in confirming or denying the call – but the antiquated MacCam system would have been.

“The old MacCam was set up down the lines, so we would have had a close-up to judge if it was a horribly bad call, or if she did in fact foot-fault,” Fishman explains. “Sometimes in those moments, the old technology could have given us the definitive angle.”

The SwingVision technology, however, is a different story. Using high-speed cameras to capture up to 40,000 frames per second, SwingVision offers stunning shots that other camera systems simply cannot produce.

“It’s a tremendous camera and system,” Fishman says. “Because it’s shooting at such high speed, you must have an incredible amount of light, which is why it’s not as good at night. Because the replays are showed so much slower to get the impact of the image, you just have to be careful about the timing, but we generally use those shots at the end of a game, rather than between points, because you can get caught on that.”

“When the match is exciting, it drives a more frantic cutting,” Fishman explains. “In the shot that Federer hit between his legs, that’s a moment that calls for a montage of pictures: close-ups, the reaction to Djokovic who was amazed at the shot himself, the crowd going nuts, his wife cheering. That’s when the director has the ability to make a lot of choices in a very short amount of time.”

Fishman has plenty of choices to make between points, as he has the final say on just how many replays to show between serves, and he is adamant about not cutting it so close that the viewers miss a serve.

“I think the worst mistake directors in tennis make is getting fancy with extreme close-ups, and then the ball toss, and then making a cut,” Fishman says. “You want to get there in tennis before the serve, just the way you want to get to the line of scrimmage before the snap in football. That’s the biggest sin you can make, is being overzealous in that moment, at the beginning of a point.”

Fishman says it is the director’s job to make the final decision on how many replays to get in before cutting back to the live action – and to know which players bounce the ball 20 times before their serve and which tend to serve quickly. Fishman watches for the players’ tells – are they asking for a towel, are they pacing the baseline – to determine how much time he has to replay Federer’s picture-perfect winner before the action gets back under way.

Genesis Networks Manager of Field Engineering Julian Segura has more than 30 feeds to keep him busy at any given moment

Getting 32 different signals from the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center to destinations across the globe is a complicated endeavor, but, for the past 15 days, Genesis Networks has been up to the task.

“What we’ve got here is, we’ve basically taken 32 outbound paths in a mixture of HD and SDI signals,” explains Julian Segura, manager of field engineering for Genesis Networks. “We have 4 return signals as well as nine data channels, and it’s essentially all connecting on 10 fiber-optic paths. Every channel gets a destination assignment. The signals are muxed together into several streams so we can transport on our private network for point-to-point delivery.”

Genesis Networks set up two paths leaving the tennis center, a primary and a backup path.

“They all leave through the same pipeline, and then they split once they leave Flushing Meadows,” Segura explains. “We get two different relay points, so if one fails, the other one takes over basically seamlessly. We’ve had a couple of events where we lost our primary path, the flow moved over to the secondary path, and it’s just a matter of a visual glitch, which is phenomenal when you compare it to being down on a satellite and waiting anywhere from a few minutes to hours for weather to pass.”

Genesis Networks began its tennis world tour at the Australian Open, where Segura says, the payload capacity was much less, and steadily increased at the French Open and Wimbledon under the direction of Jeff Hallman, director of international event operations. (Hallman was unexpectedly recalled to London and missed the final days of the U.S. Open.)

“For this deployment, it was a solid week of setup,” Segura explains. “It’s slow going in that first week. Setting up the actual equipment we could probably do in a day, but the connectivity between the equipment and the resources takes some time.”

So what’s the toughest part of transmitting this massive two-week endeavor without a hitch?

“The biggest challenge here is, overcoming the logistical difficulties associated with a temporary remote site,” Segura says. “Ensuring connectivity throughout the event means creating a controlled environment for the equipment to operate.”

A rain-delayed Final means an extra day of work for the USOpen.org staff -- and a great way for people at work to watch the Final match.

No one at CBS Sports was thrilled with the rain delay that moved the men’s singles final match to Monday afternoon – except maybe the folks at CBSSports.com. Thanks to a quickly-formed agreement between CBS Sports and the USTA, Monday’s final will be streamed on USOpen.org – the only CBS broadcast window that will be streamed online during the course of the two-week tournament.

“We went through this process a year ago and provided live streaming after a rain delay pushed the final back a day,” explains Phil Green, USTA senior director of advanced media. “Going into this one, if the men’s final was going to move, I think based on past experience and how successful it was, the assumption coming in was that we’ll be able to get this done.”

Get it done they did, and quickly, too. As soon as the announcement was made on Friday night that the men’s final would move to Monday, the television schedule was updated to reflect that the final would also be streamed on USOpen.org. The stream will flow through the U.S. Open’s player, but it will be provided in partnership with CBS.

“The interactive media console that we’ve been using throughout the tournament has CBSSports.com branding on it now,” Green says. “Just for the men’s final we’ll include in the header ‘In Association with CBSSports.com,’ so it’s a combined effort. It’s a huge initiative for all of us and it’s the same way we did it last year.”

As was the case in 2008, CBS is working with the USTA to promote awareness and drive traffic through CBSSports.com, CBS.com, and all of CBS’ other online properties. In return, the USTA has tweaked the player so that CBS can better track the users who log on.

“Working with IBM, we created a separate version of the player for CBS to link to,” Green explains. “It’s just different from a traffic reporting standpoint, so that we can better track what’s coming from CBS so they’re aware of it. Because we’re streaming this together, it’s important that they’re able to track what they’re driving.”

“The biggest problem is crewing,” explains CBS Sports Senior Engineer Nick Muro. “Being that, in today’s environment, we have so many freelancers, everybody is booked on other shows, and everybody has commitments. Whether you’re staff or not, everybody has doctor’s appointments, the kids have to go to school, you have other commitments, so the biggest problem is finding crew for the extra day.”

In addition to preparing for Monday’s men’s final match, the CBS team is now charged with changing flights, extending hotel stays, and finding the additional cash required to do so.

“There’s a lot of expense now,” Muro explains. “Not only are we keeping people extra days and paying their salaries but the extra hotel rooms, changing people’s flights – but that comes with the responsibility of being the host provider.”

“After Courts 3, 11, and 13 were released and the truck pulled out, later that afternoon, the USTA came to me and said oh, by the way, we need Court 3 [Grandstand] back again,” explains Nick Muro, senior engineer for CBS Sports. “I looked over in the production compound and saw an empty hole where the truck should have been.”

So the CBS Sports team set about building a control room for the world feed from scratch – in about two hours. ESPN’s ITV crew had been using a 12-input switcher that was currently not in use, so Muro started with that.

“I pulled some spare cameras from other courts that were dark and dragged them over, got a world-feed graphics machine up there, and we cobbled together a control room on Friday,” Muro explains. “We had to jump through all those hoops, and then it turned out we didn’t use it, but we got it working. We put together a world control room in just about two hours.”

Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate for a long enough window to get any of the matches started, but had the skies cleared, Muro’s team was ready to go.

“I like to be thrown curves,” Muro smiles. “I like to have to think outside the box. I like that part. I find it challenging and exciting.”

“If we want to show matches from this year, that’s easy,” explains Nick Muro, senior engineer for CBS Sports. “If it’s from the current year, it lives on EVS XFile disc. We have an EVS XFile per day, per court, of clean world feeds that we produce because we’re the host provider. We keep those in the library, so, if we want to go back to the previous day’s match for rain fill, we will take one of those drives, load that content onto an EVS swing machine, and play it back from there.”

CBS also relied on a tapeless workflow for the 2008 U.S. Open, so content from last year’s tournament is easily loaded through the EVS XFile system, as well. Before last year, however, it’s back to the world of tape.

“We have one SRW machine, one HDCAM machine, and one DigiBeta machine in the system,” Muro explains. “We used the HDCAM and the SRW during the rain delays on Friday and Saturday.”

Although the team certainly plans for rain fill by choosing matches that are interesting, CBS keeps the content relevant by airing archive matches between players still alive in the tournament – but they do not know who those players will be until the tournament plays out. Luckily, there are some fan favorites in the archive.

“We never know which matches we will show, although every year we seem to go to Jimmy Connors and Aaron Krickstein,” Muro laughs. “That’s a favorite. I think we’ve shown that 30 times over the last 30 years.”

Arthur Ashe Stadium

WS Kim Clijsters [BEL] vs. Serena Williams [USA] (2)

Louis Armstrong Stadium

Fernando Gonzalez [CHI] (11) vs. Rafael Nadal [ESP] (3)

Grandstand

Yanina Wickmayer [BEL] vs. Caroline Wozniacki [DEN] (9)

CBS will have its hands full when the three matches go live, but sponteneity is nothing new for the CBS Broadcast team.

It was the second straight night sports fans tuned to ESPN2 in record numbers for tennis.  Wednesday’s audience broke the household record set 24 hours earlier, an average of 1,718,000 homes (2,128,000 viewers), based on a 1.7 rating.  That evening’s telecast saw No. 2 Serena Williams oust No. 10 Flavia Pennetta and No. 3 Rafael Nadal top No. 13 Gael Monfils. The previous record was the 2007 Australian Open final with 1,715,000 homes (2,199,000 viewers).

Through eight days, ESPN2’s first-ever coverage of tennis’s US Open has averaged an audience 24% larger across the daily marathon telecasts (sometimes longer than 12 hours), up from an average of 677,000 households to 838,000. ESPN2 is averaging a 0.7 US household rating for 86 hours (up 10% from the 78 hours scheduled due to late-running matches), up 16% from a 0.6 for 2008 to date.