The opening days of a large tennis tournament stage more matches at once than any broadcaster could cover conventionally. The solution is to grade coverage by court rather than attempt uniformity.
The first week is the hard part
A main draw opens with dozens of matches across two days, played simultaneously on every available court. By the second week the same site is running two or three matches a day.
Production capacity therefore has to peak precisely when the audience for any individual match is smallest, which is the opposite of how most sports events are resourced.
Tournaments respond by building a system that can produce many low-cost feeds at once rather than a few expensive ones, and scaling down as the draw contracts.
Show courts get full crews
The main stadium and one or two supporting courts receive the complete treatment: many cameras, replay operators, dedicated commentary and the officiating technology the sport requires.
These are the courts sold to broadcasters as guaranteed content, and their schedules are negotiated with rights holders because the marquee matches must appear there.
Everything about that production is duplicated across the show courts, since matches run concurrently and no equipment or crew can be shared between them.
Outside courts run minimal automated setups
Smaller courts are covered by a handful of fixed cameras, some robotic, with framing handled remotely or by software that follows play using the ball and player positions.
Commentary, where it exists, is often added from a booth at a central facility by someone watching the same feed the viewer will see, rather than from courtside.
Line-calling and scoring systems still run at full specification on every court, because officiating cannot be graded by court importance even when coverage is.
A central facility assembles everything
All feeds arrive at an on-site technical operations centre, which records every court continuously and distributes any of them to any buyer on request.
Broadcasters take a produced main feed plus the ability to select other courts, and streaming platforms typically offer every court simultaneously to the viewer directly.
Because everything is recorded whether or not it is transmitted, highlights can be cut from a court nobody was watching live, which is where many of the tournament's clips originate.
Scheduling is constrained by production, not only by tennis
The order of play must avoid placing two matches that broadcasters want on courts that cannot both be fully covered, and must stagger start times so the facility is not overwhelmed.
Matches are also moved between courts mid-day when one finishes early, which requires the production centre to reassign resources with very little notice.
The published schedule is the visible output of that balancing act, which is why it changes and why a match can be promoted to a show court after the day has begun.
