SVG All-Stars: LJ Helbig, Senior Manager, Broadcast Engineering, FloSports

The former University of Wyoming wrestler is essential in helping the rapidly growing streamer delivers more than 50,000 live events per year

The sports-production industry continues to evolve at a remarkable pace, fueled by new technology, new workflows, and a new generation of leaders pushing the craft forward. Now in Season 3, our SVG All-Stars series highlights the innovators and decision-makers driving that progress. Through each conversation, we explore their career paths, leadership philosophies, creative and technical breakthroughs, and the ideas shaping the future of live sports production.

When you work for a platform that livestreams more than 50,000 sports events a year, engineering isn't just about keeping shows on the air. It's about building systems, workflows, and teams that can scale reliably, repeatably, and under pressure. At FloSports, LJ Helbig, senior manager, broadcast engineering, is helping lead that effort, driving the technical and operational strategy behind one of the most ambitious live-streaming operations in sports.

He oversees the infrastructure powering FloSports' massive live-event ecosystem, from hundreds of encoders and contribution devices in the field to the company's transmission facilities in Austin, TX, and Bloomington, IL. His team supports complex remote-production workflows bringing hundreds of feeds to control rooms for switching, commentary, and distribution and helps guide FloSports' migration to its Next Generation Streaming Platform. He also plays a key role in R&D initiatives, such as the Production Suite for FloCollege, a standardized production and encoding model designed to help schools deliver more-professional, reliable broadcasts at scale.

A former University of Wyoming wrestler, Helbig brings a competitor's mindset to his leadership style. His philosophy is rooted in leading by example, building trust, and empowering through grit, and that is reflected across his career, which he began in 2013 as an event manager at FloSports. The role gave him a first-hand education in everything from logistics and crewing to encoder setup and NOC operations. Today, that experience informs how he builds scalable systems, develops engineering talent, and drives reliability across a fast-growing platform.

At FloSports, Helbig leads a team of 10 offering support in networking, audio/video, switchers/encoders, and transcoding for more than 50,000 live-streaming events annually.In this edition of SVG All-Stars, Helbig discusses the engineering discipline behind large-scale live streaming, the importance of hardware standardization and applied AI, and why the next generation of broadcast professionals will need to bridge traditional production grit with modern software-driven workflows.

What are the key responsibilities of your current role?

As senior manager of broadcast engineering, I lead the technical and operational strategy behind a streaming infrastructure that powers more than 50,000 live sporting events each year.

On the technical side, I oversee the infrastructure and equipment that support our live event broadcasts, including more than 900 Videon nodes/MAX units, 260+ laptops, 49 TVU packs, and 105 Pixellot units, while also helping drive our migration to the Next Generation Streaming Platform, which is a critical enhancement that uplevels our streaming performance across all channels.

I'm responsible for the stability and reliability of our Austin and Bloomington transmission facilities, which are critical to delivering a dependable, high-quality viewing experience for customers. I also partner closely with our programming and production teams on complex remote-production workflows that bring hundreds of live feeds back to our control rooms for switching, commentary, and distribution.

My team and I also lead R&D initiatives that help shape future production capabilities, including Production Suite for FloCollege, a production and encoding solution designed to help producers elevate broadcast quality on the FloSports platform while creating more-reliable, standardized streams. By combining standardized hardware, graphics, and workflows into a turnkey model, Production Suite helps partners produce more-professional and -dependable broadcasts at scale. After successfully beta-testing the solution across 11 schools during the 2025-26 season, we are on track to scale to at least 40 schools this coming fall and continue expanding from there.

On the leadership side, I'm focused on scalability and team development. I developed the department's engineering ladder to create clear career pathing, and I've led initiatives aimed at building a high-performance team culture. A big part of my role is improving Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) and Mean Time to Mitigation (MTTM), while also driving uptime and error-free minutes across our operation.

Helbig, a former collegiate wrestler, has been able to stay involved in the sport he loves thanks to FloSports' active work in its FloWrestling vertical.What is one key industry trend that you believe is having a major impact on your organization right now?

One of the biggest trends impacting our organization is the standardization of hardware at scale, increasingly supported by applied AI workflows. At FloSports, we're not just managing a handful of high-profile feeds. Over the last five years, my team has had a significant impact on this initiative, helping standardize and deploy roughly 900 encoders in the field to support our continued growth, along with several other contribution-device types totaling more than 400 additional units.

As the number of events on the FloSports platform continues to grow, maintaining consistency across that hardware footprint is critical. That standardization has been a key driver of scalability, operational efficiency, an

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/05/25/svg-all-stars-lj-helbig-senior-...
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