The triangle: Bringing the International Northwest 200 motorcycle race to BBC Sport viewers with Greenlight Productions By Heather McLean Monday, May 19, 2025 - 14:00
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Greenlight Productions has been producing the Northwest 200 for live broadcast for nearly 20 years since 2007
Greenlight Productions has just completed bringing the International Northwest 200 a wild motorcycle road race that courses through Northern Irish streets connecting the towns of Portstewart, Coleraine and Portrush on the Causeway Coast and Glens to BBC Sport viewers.
The race was first held in 1929 and was originally run over two hundred miles as a handicap race, before changing to its current format of several separate races, each running four to six laps. Today it uses a street circuit known affectionately as the triangle' and has become the largest annual sporting event in Northern Ireland, attracting over 150,000 global visitors with bikes hitting average speeds of 120 miles per hour with top speeds of over 200 miles per hour making it one of the fastest courses globally.
Greenlight carried out the entire host broadcast for the Northwest 200 for BBC Sport, including supplying the OBs, transmission and kit, crew and post production.
Says Aisling Ridout, production manager at Greenlight Productions: We provide probably about 20 hours of live coverage across three days for BBC online for the Northwest 200, and then we also turn around quick highlights programmes for BBC One, Northern Ireland and BBC Three. For the first one, TX is on the Friday, and then we've got a Sunday and a Monday TX, so in terms of delivering programming when nothing's happening, that's quite a big challenge.
Some of the Greenlight Productions crew working at the 2025 Northwest 200 for BBC Sport
Evolving production
Greenlight has been producing the race for live broadcast for nearly 20 years since 2007, and in that time it has evolved significantly. The most recent major change to the production was taking it remote, which happened over the 2020 period.
Comments Ridout: The production has changed hugely. Our business as a whole has changed hugely, as I think quite a lot of other businesses have since the pandemic. We're headquartered on the Isle of Man. We've got offices in Manchester and also in Tampa, Florida. Just before the pandemic, we were doing a series over in the States and they wanted to do a live broadcast without the costs involved, so we tested out a remote system, left everything out in the Tampa office, came back to the UK, and then we were locked down, but then when sports started again in the States we were able to carry on producing remotely.
That American series was the USA Trans Am Series. In the first weekend of March 2020, the first round of the Trans Am Series held at Sebring International Raceway was successfully livestreamed from Greenlight's Tampa studio in a remote production, which the company has continued to use.
That's how we've changed the Northwest 200, said Ridout. Previously we would do it with a full OB unit on site, with a tender running, rigging loads of cables, but now we've evolved it, so we're using Mobile Viewpoint technology to transmit pictures back to where we do the production from our Isle of Man base. So it's evolved quite heavily, which is great, especially from a green' point of view.
Greenlight uses Vislink's Mobile Viewpoint Agile AirLink Ultra 5G mobile encoders for the production. On the Mobile Viewpoint kit, Ridout says: We have internet connectivity put in for us at each of the camera locations because the problem we have both with the Northwest 200 and the Island Man TT is that there's a huge fan base that arrive, and that everybody wants to watch the live on their mobile phone. From a cell signal point of view, it's quite challenging; that can be quite impacted by the crowds. So we've got a different providers [for private 4G networks] that give us internet connectivity at each of the camera points. Greenlight uses Telenet, a local IT provider, for the internet infrastructure for transmission.
For the Northwest 200 Greenlight used the vMix replay system and a Vizrt Viz system for graphics. The team also took the timing partner's data for use in commentary and analysis. The timing system is bespoke for the race. Says Ridout: There's a chap that's been there for donkeys years that's written all sorts of bits of software and stuff for timing .
Greenlight Productions' grid team at the 2025 Northwest 200
Challenges and innovations
New for the production this year was a drone, provided by Greenlight's own inhouse full time drone pilot. Comments Ridout: For the first time we had a drone in operation, which had been quite a challenge to get the organisers and the race organising body on board with us for drone usage. We use drones a lot in all lots of our other productions. I think [the Northwest organisers] were quite nervous about it being on a road racetrack basically. But we've successfully and very safely flown the drone during the Isle of Man TT previously, so I think that helped our cause a lot.
That was a transformative part of the production, she continues. Lots of people were talking about it, and it seemed to go very well. It's just a new perspective and a new angle for the production. It looked great, but there was a lot of coordination going on in the background for it, especially with the police and the helicopters and all that kind of thing, so that added a bit more work to the production.
A road race with motorbikes charging through numerous towns can pose a lot of challenges, one of which is the weather. Says Ridout: One of the main challenges we have is the weather. They will race in some rain at the Northwest 2
