Q&A: WBD’s Scott Young on “the most immersive Commonwealth Games ever”

Broadcast Sport talks to Scott Young (pictured below), executive vice president, WBD Sports Europe (TNT Sports and Eurosport) about the broadcaster’s ambitious plans for coverage of The Commonwealth Games 2026.

The entire Games will stream live on HBO Max, while WBD is introducing a linear viewing experience called the Commonwealth Games 360 channel, which allows viewers to immerse themselves in the action taking place at the time they start watching.

Your Commonwealth Games 2026 coverage is being described as a “never-before-seen viewing experience” – what does this mean?

We’re very confident this is going to be the most immersive coverage of a Commonwealth Games ever produced.

We’re showing over 600 hours of live coverage across every discipline, and we’ll make sure that you’re there for every medal. 

We’re going to let the viewer curate their own experience so they can watch every moment of the Games they want to experience. 

We’ve also created the 360 program concept, where we’ll show you the most exciting part of the Games happening at that moment, alongside behind-the-scenes clips and all those medal moments.

What exactly is the Commonwealth Games 360 channel?

From morning to night, hosted at our Commonwealth Games studio in Glasgow, we will give you the full 360 experience.

360 pulls in all the content from the different venues, so you can tune in at any time, and we’ll update you on what’s going on and make sure you’re there for the moments that matter. 

Equally, on HBO Max, every moment of the Games is at your disposal. So, it’s about allowing the customer to curate that experience. We genuinely believe that because of the power of our linear business alongside our streaming business, we have a very immersive coverage..

Are you producing everything from Glasgow or utilising remote production?

It’s a mix – our studio will be at the primary venue in Glasgow where the opening ceremony takes place, and is also the venue for netball, and we’ll also be on the ground with our cameras at every venue.

The cameras and audio are sent back to our master control areas in both London and Paris to be remotely produced. We’re leaning in on our Olympics experience as to how to produce these big multi-sport events, bringing that technical experience and editorial experience to the Commonwealth Games.

How will your coverage be on a similar scale to The Olympics?

From when we were initially looking at what we thought we may need to achieve our editorial ambition for the Commonwealth Games, we have actually scaled up quite significantly. The reason for that is we want our storytelling is to be everywhere – you can’t be selective, and we never want to be sitting here saying, you know, “It’s a shame we weren’t at location X when that athlete did something amazing.” 

What I love about these Games is you have ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and we have to have great storytellers there with the technology to capture those moments.

Please tell me about the personalisation options available through HBO Max

When you go onto our streaming platform, there are certain products and tools that will help you personalise your experience. This includes Medal Alerts, which was very popular for our last two Olympics.

It allows you to watch any sport discipline you choose, and as there is a medal popping at another event, an alert comes up and, if you can click on that alert, it will take you directly to that sport. 

It deals with the fear of missing out on any moment across the Games and allows you to freely surf all the other sports that are on at the time.

We’re also bringing an enhanced Multi-View to the Commonwealth Games. That allows viewers, as part of the HBO Max experience, to watch four different tiles at once. You can then click on any one of those tiles so have the full viewing experience of that feed.

How will you measure the success of your Commonwealth Games coverage?

I think by engagement. Hopefully we find an audience that thoroughly enjoys being able to watch the Commonwealth Games as they want to watch it, when they want to watch it, where they want to watch it. 

The success for us is putting the games into the hands of the consumer and going, “You can watch anything you want whenever you want, please dive in and watch as much as possible.” And when they do that, that is really our measure of success.