Live From the Overwatch League Grand Finals: Wells Fargo Center Welcomes Blizzard Entertainment for Sophomore Season's Final Clash The ultimate broadcast includes 27 cameras, onsite programming, and a custom observer room By Kristian Hernandez, Associate Editor
Sunday, September 29, 2019 - 9:00 am
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It's been an unprecedented week full of esports-related events in Philadelphia. This past Wednesday, the 2018 Overwatch League runner-up Philadelphia Fusion broke ground on their new arena that will be ready to open in 2021. Today, the two best teams of this year's season, the San Francisco Shock and the Vancouver Titans, as well as every fan in the esports universe will come in droves to the Wells Fargo Center for the 2019 Overwatch League Grand Finals.
the 171 ft. wide LED video wall is the centerpiece of the Overwatch League Grand Finals stage.
The relationship with Barclays Center was great, but this venue is owned by one of our teams, says Pete Emminger, VP, global broadcast, Blizzard Entertainment. Since Comcast Spectacor owns the Fusion and this building, they have become one of our constant partners. They've been super helpful, and we've had a really good collaboration. The [Wells Fargo Center team] have been going through a pretty recent renovation and they've kept in the loop on the progress and all of their plans.
Spectator Sport: Compound Hosts a Makeshift Observer Room
For video game aficionados, there's nothing worse than getting eliminated from a match and having to watch your buddies duke it out for the victory in spectator mode. In an esports production, this player purgatory is the heartbeat of a successful telecast. Outside of the Wells Fargo Center, two NEP mobile production trucks (EN3's A and B units) is handling all of the typical bells and whistles of a traditional sporting event, but inside NEP's BT-1 auxiliary unit, this is where the true magic happens. In a blur of adrenaline and excitement, multiple technicians are controlling the observer room that handles all of the in-game coverage.
The observer room's system and the game system are connected to the same network, says Emminger. Since we're IT-dependent, everything is fully integrated into that department. We also leverage a global network operations center at home [in Irvine, CA] where they manage this entire infrastructure with sensors in the computers.
In addition to their responsibility of publishing the in-game footage, the observer room is controlling the personalized viewing for Overwatch League All-Access Pass subscribers on Twitch.
As the nucleus of the production, the observer room has access to all 12 game feeds.
In the other NEP EN3 units, the A-unit will be the home of the main production crew. Other production duties, such as EVS servers (with 30 channels of replay) and transmission services will be in the B-unit.
All of the Lights: Massive LED Video Wall Puts the Cherry on Top
Seventy-five lbs. of confetti, 175 chain hoists, 2,739 ft. of truss, and 165,206 lbs. worth of show rigging are accented by a sparking jewel that will make it virtually impossible to not see all of the details occurring during the match for those in attendance. Spanning across the entire length of the main platform and using more than five miles of fiber, a 171 ft. wide LED Hero screen (that is three ft. wider than the White House) will add another wrinkle to the production. Blizzard partnered with Creative Technology Group, a live events sector of NEP, on this project.
We have a custom graphics system that we've been continuing to further develop that's built off of Touch Designer, says Emminger. We're able to trigger all of the screen graphics that are 12x 4K resolution.
On the other hand, a new toy in the Wells Fargo Center in the form of the recently constructed 4K kinetic video board, will not make an appearance at this year's championship to avoid issues with the sightline of the players.
Since the uniqueness of the Overwatch League (and esports, in general) mixes the broadcast, live stream, and in-venue show, Vizrt Viz Trio systems are powering the graphics package. Three will be on the premises for the standard show, while four will be offsite to implement overlays that cater to regional areas.
Each gaming station includes the player's own keyboard and mouse and a POV camera above the monitor.
Around the World in Seconds: Transmission Reaches 32 Destinations
With the league's 20 teams coming from six countries on three separate continents, the viewership for the Grand Finals will be on a global scale. With 29 original feeds (plus three backup channels), a total of 32 transmission paths will move the various signals to and from the TV compound via IP distribution through the cloud with AWS.
On Twitch, the matches will host channels in five languages: English (overwatchleague), Korean (overwatchleague_kr), Russian (overwatchleague_ru), French (overwatchleague_fr), and Portuguese (overwatchleague_br).
For the live stream on the ESPN App and the broadcast on ABC, there will be dual paths with the help of LTN Global Communications and Zixi to ESPN, which will then be routed to both endpoints.
For the abundant amount of content being generated during the two to three-hour extravaganza, Emminger and company have concocted an intricate system for on-demand, sponsorship, and social media purposes.
We have a pretty heavy MAM architecture, so we're all object-based storage in a data center. We have a team [back at headquarters] doing a few things, such as content in postproduction and localizing a lot of our global sponsorship deals into multiple languages, he says. Our team has access to the live feed off of a 10 GB connection for a mini asset management system onsite, so they can cond
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Live From the Overwatch League Grand Finals: Wells Fargo Center Welcomes Blizzard Entertainment for Sophomore Season's Final Clash The ultimate broadcast includes 27 cameras, onsite programming, and a custom observer room By Kristian Hernandez, Associate Editor 
