National Lacrosse League Opens Season With New Cloud-Based Official Replay-Review SystemLow-latency, multi-angle platform offers bench-side access for teams to issue challengesBy Brandon Costa, Director of Digital Tuesday, December 2, 2025 - 9:39 am
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The National Lacrosse League kicked off its new season on Friday with a distinctly Canadian flavor: a Southern Ontario showdown between the Toronto Rock and the league's newest franchise, the Oshawa FireWolves, who made both their league and official home debut at the Tribute Communities Centre in downtown Oshawa. Beyond the on-floor storylines, though, the league's biggest debut may have been taking shape inside the penalty box.
The National Lacrosse League's new official review technology allows referees and coaches to access camera sources in a cloud-based replay system. (Photos: National Lacrosse League)
This season, the NLL is rolling out a brand-new cloud-based official replay-review system that promises faster decisions, cleaner communication, and a more level competitive playing field.
Designed in partnership with BitFire, the league's longtime IP-transmission provider, the platform gives officials direct control over replay review field-side right between the benches. It also provides the same system to both teams' benches to make it quicker and easier to issue challenges on controversial plays. The system makes every camera angle available from the broadcast and in-venue cameras and delivers dramatically lower latency than the mix-of-sources workflow it replaces.
For a league our size, we punch way above our weight class, says Ed Derse, SVP, technology and broadcast operations, National Lacrosse League. Fortunately, cloud technologies have advanced to the point that it allows us to do this now. We're very confident and feel comfortable with it. We're excited about it.
Faster, Fairer Reviews - and a Better Experience for CoachesThe replay system attempts to remedy one of the league's longstanding issues: instituting a fast, fair, and equitable review and challenge system.
Per league rules, teams have only 30 seconds to trigger a challenge and, until now, were at the mercy of whatever the videoboard operator chose to show. It's easy to see how that could generate controversy, particularly for visiting teams seeing only what the home crew decided to display.
Relying on the game-presentation production to show replays on the jumbotron was difficult for the teams, Derse notes. And the system as a whole was inefficient for the officials, who would have to rely on the back and forth with the game presentation. There are always questions: did we get everything in? This system was designed to eliminate all of that.
Even better for competitive fairness the system now creates parallel cloud instances for each team's bench. That means both benches get independent access to the same multi-angle feeds and DVR tools that the officials use.
Now the benches don't have to rely on the jumbotron, Derse explains. They're going to have access to the same camera angles that the referees will have, and these are separate instances: they won't see what the referees are looking at, and they won't see what the other bench is looking at.
The NLL's replay-review system is built on the IP-based backbone that the league has in place for broadcast through its partnership with BitFire.
The new system also dramatically reduces latency. Derse estimates that the NLL's new workflow operates all under a second. That matters when teams have such a small window in which to make challenges. In our league, most challenges revolve around goals: did the ball cross the goal line before a person touched inside of the crease [or] before the expiration of the shot clock? This system gives the officials time-synced views with zoom capability to make calls with razor-thin margins.
The system quickly showed its worth on Opening Weekend, when the first three challenges of the season led to calls' being overturned. The review setup was soft-tested during last year's NLL Finals and performed well. Officials were trained early, and coaches were briefed during a 52-person session in November.
Building Review Functionality - in the CloudTwo years ago, Derse approached BitFire with a straightforward idea: by leveraging the league's existing IP backbone and hybrid-remote transmission model, replay could move to the cloud and be put directly into the hands of officials. Based on BitFire's cloud-native Spark production environment, the system does just that.
Rather than centralizing replay, the NLL opted for a model more like the NBA's or that of many college conferences: decisions remain onsite, with officials gaining full access to synchronized camera feeds, DVR controls, and visual tools they never had before.
BitFire is delivering a cloud-based DVR system, which brings all of the camera angles to the officials and lets them manipulate all of them using a set of tools, Derse says. They can control the DVR, rewind, select from multiple views. We even have pinch and zoom.
Each NLL venue now houses a rolling BitFire server cart, which ingests every camera feed and pushes them into AWS, where the league's custom application layer creates per-game DVR instances. Every camera is time-synced, and the interface mirrors the controls of a traditional replay system, including a custom X-keys panel with jog wheel, speed controls, and direct camera selection.
Although the technology rivals what centralized systems in major leagues deliver, the NLL built its system at a fraction of the cost by relying on cloud infrastructure, IP transport, and a hybrid-remote production philosophy.
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