Riot Games Boosts At-Home Production at League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational The esports producer transmitted 34 sources from Paris to L.A. with just an 800-Mbps IP path By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor Wednesday, June 20, 2018 - 10:00 am
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The concept of at-home production is nothing new for Riot Games, which has been leveraging its West Los Angeles esports-production facility in some fashion for its live productions around the globe for several years. However, over the past 18 months, the videogame publisher has been working on taking the productions to the next level with a new low-bandwidth IP contribution scheme that would allow more than 30 sources to be sent to Los Angeles in near real time from many more countries around the world.
Three weeks ago, Royal Never Give Up hoisted the League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational trophy at Zenith Arena in Paris.
The fruits of these efforts were realized last month during the League of Legends (LoL) Mid-Season Invitational in Paris: during three six-hour days of competition, Riot Games successfully transmitted 34 1080p60 live sources to L.A. at a latency of just 175 ms. The show was cut and produced live out of Riot Games' control room in Los Angeles and distributed around the world on streaming platforms Twitch and YouTube, linear broadcast, and simulcast in 12 languages around the globe.
One of the big topics in the entire broadcast industry is sustainability, and Riot is leading the charge with the tech needed to achieve this, says Mitch Rosenthal, senior manager, broadcast operations, esports, Riot Games. Our company goal is always to be the most player-focused company in the world. This [drives] us to build solutions that cater to all of our players. Reaching that goal pushed us in the direction of a REMI[, or at-home,] workflow. That means we can continue to produce great content that provides the widest player reach, giving us more to reinvest in the broadcast and grow the product globally.
Sustained Success Requires a Sustainable At-Home Model
As a global brand, Riot Esports produces live esports events all over the world every year, making at-home production a logical game plan. However, the cost of securing the 10-Gbps fiber circuit necessary to deploy the at-home model (using J2K compression) and the total lack of such connectivity in many less developed countries spurred Riot Games to begin searching for a workflow in which it could transmit 30-plus sources over a 1-Gbps pipe.
Riot Games successfully transmitted 34 1080p60 live sources to L.A. at a latency of just 175 ms.
Fundamentally, if we want to continue to do events all over the globe long term, then we need to figure out ways to work towards better sustainability and global compatibility, says Ray Panahon, technical lead, esports, Riot Games. The fact of the matter is that a lot of countries simply can't always provide the reliable 10-gig connection we need for [at-home production] and, when they can, it is commonly cost-prohibitive. We have to think about how we do this in the future in places like Shanghai, S o Paolo, and Saigon [with bandwidth constraints]. So we started looking at using MPEG-4 contribution-encoding hardware in place of J2K as a codec for REMI.
The Path to 1-Gig: Haivision Helps Lead the Way
Over the past 18 months, the Riot Games technical and engineering teams explored multiple vendors' MPEG-4/H.264 encoding/decoding solutions in an effort to overcome the primary obstacle: minimizing or eliminating video drift and maintaining lip sync over tens of encoder streams. Riot eventually collaborated with Haivision and devised an H.264 compression scheme capable of transmitting three dozen 1080p60 video paths using 1 Gbps or less while synchronizing audio and video within a single frame.
In February, Riot broadcast engineers Max Trauss and Michael Caal lead the first test of the technology during Week 9 of its North American LCS spring season, in which 34 video sources were sent from the L.A. live studio audience through the Riot Direct network to Japan and back into its control room (approximately 12,000 miles). The team successfully produced two days of games of more than six hours each with under-500-ms latency.
On the audio side, Riot successfully tested remote audio mixing using a Calrec RP1 production system in Paris and a Calrec Artemis console in Los Angeles.
The primary prerequisite was ultra-low latency and synchronization at MPEG-4 compression that would get us under that gigabit, says Panahon. Haivision was dedicated to overcoming the initial technical hurdles , so they were a huge piece of the puzzle.
The workflow went live last month at the LoL Mid-Season Invitational, where 34 sources were sent 5,500 miles from Paris to L.A. over an 800-Mbps point-to-point MPLS IP path with just 175-ms lag. As a result, it was business as usual for the production team, notes Panahon.
The impact on the production team was zero, says Rosenthal. They had to work through it at first, and the test we did in Japan was a huge step forward, but it had no impact whatsoever for [Mid-Season Invitational in] Paris. And it saved hundreds of thousands of dollars leaving the crew work from L.A. The high-compression-transmission workflow also reduced the requirements for venue bandwidth, which was another huge cost reduction.
More Than Just Video: Prompting, Shading, Audio Mixing, and Switching From L.A.
The at-home workflow isn't limited to video feeds, however. Riot also remotely transported the teleprompter over IP: actual scrolling and prompting was performed in Los Angeles and fed to an Autocue Qbox portable scroll system in Paris.
MSI was streamed in 15+ languages, across 14 digital platforms and broadcast on two TV channels.
Riot also tested remote camera shading for its Grass
