BlizzCon 2019: As Esports Presence Grows, So Too Does Size of Blizzard Entertainment's Production

BlizzCon 2019: As Esports Presence Grows, So Too Does Size of Blizzard Entertainment's Production By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor

Friday, November 1, 2019 - 2:02 pm

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One the biggest weekends on the annual gaming calendar takes over the Anaheim Convention Center today, as 40,000 fans come together for BlizzCon 2019. While many of the headlines coming out of BlizzCon will once again focus on the big video game releases and announcements from game publisher Blizzard, the convention's live esports stages have garnered more and more interest with each passing year.

BlizzCon takes over the Anaheim Convention Center Nov. 1-2

This is my seventh BlizzCon, and when I started in 2013, our esports stages were pretty basic and bare bones - not unlike most of the esports industry at that time, says Pete Emminger, VP, global broadcast, Blizzard Entertainment. So I'm extremely proud of not only what the whole team here has done, but also how the entire esports scene has grown and developed. In 2013, when we would open the doors, people ran directly to the front row of the gaming stages. Now, we're actually seeing so many people run in to sit in the front row of the esports stages first. That's been a pretty exciting shift in fan behavior.

Blizzard All Access serves as the news-focused studio show at the BlizzCon.

As the interest in esports has grown, so too has the size of the onsite production. This year, three of BlizzCon's seven content stages are dedicated to esports with five tournaments taking place over the next two days: the Hearthstone Global Finals, StarCraft II World Championship Series Global Finals, World of Warcraft Arena World Championship, World of Warcraft Mythic Dungeon International, and Overwatch World Cup.

When we think about BlizzCon, we look at it as a confluence of multiple experiences: it's part theme park, part sports experience, and part convention, adds Emminger. But it's all one celebration, so our job is to [deliver] that experience in a compelling way to people here at the live event and watching the broadcasts.

Seven Stages: A Sprawling Production in Anaheim

Blizzard Entertainment has rolled out eight trucks (including A and B units) and two flypacks to cover the septet of stages in Anaheim: TNDV's Exclamation at the Mythic Stage (mainstage), Dome Productions' Journal (with a B unit) at the All-Access Channel Stage, NEP's custom flypack at the Epic Stage (general content), TNDV's Gracie and a custom NEP flypack add-on at the Legendary stage (general content), Dome's Vista at the World of Warcraft Esports Stage, NEP M15 (with Blizzard's observer room B unit) for the Overwatch World Cup (Saturday) and StarCraft (Friday) Esports stage, and Clark Media's 4K-HD-Mobile for the Hearthstone Esports stage.

Dome Productions' Journey and Vista units are on hand at BlizzCon

Each truck's crew produces both the live in-venue LED board coverage and the broadcast/streaming coverage from their respective stages (as is customary in esports productions). All facilities have connected back to Blizzard's master control area via 96 miles of fiber cabling.

Load in for the massive operation began last Wednesday (Oct. 23) with power rigging and cabling, then master control began setup on Saturday (Oct. 26) and trucks pulled in on Sunday (Oct. 27).

With 40,000 attendees and all these broadcast stages, there's a pretty extensive [load-in] for BlizzCon, as you can imagine, says Emminger. And all these things have to work in concert in terms of sharing loading docks and resources because we are also offloading dozens and dozens of trucks of merchandise and setting up the store at the same time we're setting up the broadcast. So it's a very choreographed load-in process.

This year, the StarCraft and Overwatch World Cup competitions are sharing the same stage for the first time with StarCraft taking place Friday and Overwatch on Saturday. As a result, broadcasts of the Overwatch World Cup group stages actually began with five simultaneous streams on Thursday and Overwatch group-stage play continues today in Hall A.

Clark Media's 4K-HD-Mobile is producing the the Hearthstone Esports stage at BlizzCon.

StarCraft still continues to be such a popular esport for us, especially at BlizzCon, that we wanted it in a bigger room, says Emminger. But at the same time, World Cup is bigger than ever, so we actually brought out some of our multi-language casters onsite this year. It's always better for the broadcast to have the commentators onsite so [viewers] get to hear and feel the audience, and our fans [onsite] can walk right up to [the caster booth] and interact. That changes some of our tech workflows for us because we're not doing all the remote routing as we've done in the past and we think it really makes a difference for the fans.

In all, Blizzard has deployed more than 80 cameras throughout the Anaheim Convention Center, including 48 broadcast cameras, 17 robos, and 22 POVs. A whopping 33 observers (analogous to an in-game camera operator) are also onsite operating out of Blizzard's custom observer unit producing the live in-game feeds for the esports broadcasts. Between the trucks and flypacks, the broadcast team has 180 EVS replay channels at their disposal and 22 channels of CG for graphics (including Vizrt, Ross Video Xpression, CharacterWorks, and Blizzard's custom graphics engine).

Master Control: Riedel MediorNet Streamlines Signal Transport

Feeds from all stages are routed back to a central master control area at the convention center, which feeds both the in-venue show for fans onsite and broadcasts for fans streaming at home.

Blizzard Entertainment's master control is at the center of the BlizzCon production.

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