Pivoting to Virtual Races, Drone Racing League Creates End-to-End Cloud Production

Pivoting to Virtual Races, Drone Racing League Creates End-to-End Cloud Production Sports betting, 5G are in the league's post-pandemic plans By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor

Friday, January 29, 2021 - 3:06 pm

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The pandemic has forced sports leagues to dramatically change the way they conduct events, but perhaps no organization has undergone as dramatic a transformation as the Drone Racing League. When the pandemic hit, DRL was able to rapidly shift from in-person races using physical drones to virtual races that take place at simulated courses in the DRL Simulator.

To produce live broadcasts featuring a dozen pilots and nearly 40 crew members located across the globe, DRL was able to develop a fully cloud-based production workflow that continues to evolve as its 2020 DRL Allianz World Championship season comes to an end this weekend on NBC, Twitter, and Facebook.

2019 DRL Allianz World Championship Season race was held at Chase Field when IRL events were still taking place.

It has definitely been a big transition for DRL, moving to cloud-based fully virtual racing, says DRL COO Ashley Ellefson. As part of that transition to virtual races, we created a totally new broadcast-production workflow, and we have moved very heavily into cloud-based technology. We've evolved a lot since we started with this. Speed is part of DRL DNA, so we like to do things really fast.

The Transition: From In-Person and Onsite to Virtual and in the Cloud Founded in 2015, the DRL is the world's premier professional drone-racing property and, prior to the pandemic, hosted in real life (IRL) events all over the world, from London to Singapore to the U.S. Prior to 2020, each DRL season consisted of 12 drone pilots flying standardized racing drones (custom-built at DRL's NYC offices).

DRL Lead Backend Engineer Andrew Wingert's setup for the 2020 DRL Allianz World Championship Season

However, when the pandemic struck in March 2020, these IRL events came to a halt, and the league was faced with changing its plans for the 2020 season. DRL moved fast, leveraging its proprietary DRL Simulator and enlisting the same drone pilots who compete in IRL events (using the same controller and skills) to create a standalone SIM-based series called the 2020 FanDuel DRL SIM Racing Cup, which aired on NBCSN beginning in May.

Those events were postproduced, not live, says Ellefson. That was our first foray into solving the problem of being physically unable to get our crew and our pilots to the same location. We needed to come up with a way for them to both compete and operate remotely. And that is what propelled us to the cloud-based live-production path that we are now in the midst of.

After initially exploring the potential of splitting the 2020-21 season into half IRL racing and half virtual racing, the league decided to go fully virtual and kicked off the campaign in October. Adding further complexity was DRL's desire to integrate live betting into its operations (DRL inked a betting deal with DraftKings this month).

DRL TD Nate Glass's setup during the 2020 DRL Allianz World Championship Season

We had about two months to take the version 1.0 system that we had already been using and ramp that up, says Ellefson, not only so that we could do live events but also so that it was robust enough that we could integrate sports betting into our series as well.

The 2020-21 season, which consists of 16 races, began on Oct. 21 with preproduced races on NBCSN, Twitter, and Facebook Watch, but DRL was able to transition to live races less than a month later.

We got the ask on Oct. 2, says DRL Production Manager Vada Bennett. That's when we started our first instance of virtual machines, and then we went live for the first time on Nov. 19. We've been running all live with version 2.0 of our production environment ever since.

Cloud-Based Workflow: Creating a Production Ecosystem From Scratch Personnel for each DRL event consists of 37 crew members and 12 pilots - all remote, spanning eight countries across three continents. To support this multisite operation, DRL developed a production model built around 10 vMix virtual video switchers running in the Amazon EC2 cloud.

DRL transformed physical race locations into simulated courses in the DRL Simulator.

We're running 10 instances of vMix to allow us to load-balance what we have, because our show is so graphically intense, says Bennett. At any point, we are probably going to have 10 video sources on-screen between the pilot frames, background video, and the graphics. We've got those 10 vMix instances as well as a couple other VMs [virtual machines] that are doing things like a file store and transmission.

DRL also has a VM hosting a TeamSpeak comms server, which serves as communication platform for all the crew and the pilots. The TeamSpeak server is broken into about 15 channels, and a comms-specific A1 manages the different channels based on what is going on within the show format. Commentators and crew alike communicate on TeamSpeak to ensure low latency and the highest possible customization for each individual. The production team also uses discord for chat functionality during its live shows, as well as a backup comms channel.

We ended up going the TeamSpeak route because of the customization, which allowed you to actually move users through the different channels based on the instance of the show, says Bennet. We also ended up using TeamSpeak because it allows for the lowest latency possible.

All hands-on-keys crew members connect to the production environment using Elgato Stream Decks along with remote-desktop software to execute the show and triggers based on calls from the director and producer. The DRL production team distributes about 10 custom m

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