A Look Behind Luxembourg's Most Ambitious Broadcast

Some projects feel monumental from the moment the first phone call comes in. When BCE, the host broadcaster appointed to coordinate the national coverage, asked us to take on the technical realization of Luxembourg's 2025 succession weekend, I knew immediately this would be unlike anything we had done in the country before. RTL Luxembourg committed to airing the entire weekend live, and the expectations were high, not only because of the importance of the event, but because transitions of power here are so rare that almost no one gets a second chance to refine the process.

Working in Luxembourg always feels a bit personal for me. I grew up here, I speak the language, and I still remember my role as a young vision technician during the previous succession twenty-five years ago. Standing now on the other side of the glass, responsible for the full technical architecture, gave this project a very particular weight.

Building a City-Wide Remote Production

The planning started about two and a half months before the ceremony. Since the productions we do in Luxembourg often exceed the capacity of local OB units, Skyline is regularly called in when things grow bigger than usual national football matches, state visits, the Pope's visit in 2024. But even with that history, this was on another scale entirely.

The core concept was a distributed, fully remote production linking twelve locations across and around Luxembourg City directly to our OB7. OB11 supported one of the larger secondary sites, and four additional Skyline OB trucks were positioned across the country. None of those trucks operated as independent control rooms; they acted essentially as large stageboxes. All video routing, shading, sound mixing, tally, intercom, and decision-making flowed back to the city hub.

That required a network infrastructure that behaved like a single production facility stretched across a country. We deployed around thirty-eight kilometers of fiber, mapped, labeled, and redundantly routed. In Luxembourg's medieval centre that meant planning cable paths with near surgical precision. Some streets cannot be opened, some facades cannot be touched, and public life must remain functional even on a historic weekend. BCE added another critical safety net with Aviwest 5G links to secure our most vulnerable routes.

For signal transport we relied on Makito X4 encoding units and our own TV Skyline Connect system. Several locations were linked to OB7 and OB11 through Layer-2 tunnels, which allowed us to transport not only images and sound but also intercom, tally, return feeds and control data with complete transparency. At peak times, more than forty-five live cameras and over one hundred audio sources were traveling through that network at once.

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