Riot Games unveils world-leading Project Stryker esports broadcast facility in Dublin By Fergal Ringrose Friday, July 22, 2022 - 14:02
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Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage Darragh O'Brien (left) with Scott Adametz in the Technical Operations Centre
Riot Games has officially opened the first of three Remote Broadcast Centres (RBCs) making up Project Stryker, Powered by AWS, in the presence of Irish Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage Darragh O'Brien.
Three years in development, the 50,000-square foot Dublin RBC of Project Stryker will serve as a central broadcasting hub for both regional and global live esports across Riot's trio of esports titles: League of Legends Esports, VALORANT Esports and Wild Rift Esports.
Broadcast feeds from live esports competitions happening around the world can be sent to the Dublin RBC where content is produced, broadcast and distributed in multiple languages to esports fans. It is equipped with a TOC, six remote casting insert stages, six production control rooms (PCRs), six audio control rooms, multiple bullpens for observers (in-game camera operators), graphics, replay and editing, allowing it to broadcast six live events at a time around the globe.
It seems simple, but to be able to take away the barrier between your facility and the cloud, and not have to sacrifice quality or latency, is a game changer
The analogy I use is that it is really, truly, like the NFL adding Major League Baseball, Riot Games director of infrastructure engineering Scott Adametz told SVG Europe. The same company producing both. Oh, and also National Hockey League. Or maybe FIFA adding rugby. We had to understand that this was a completely different set of skills that we needed, a different set of capabilities.
The first principle here is being game-agnostic. It can't be built to satisfy any one game; it has to be dynamic. When we only had League of Legends, and it was a global event, we didn't have regional events. We had this nice and ebb and flow. But as we added new titles, the regional capacity evaporated as they couldn't produce different sports.
So suddenly, they were not an option. We knew this was coming, which is why we said it had to be a centralised facilty, built upon the latest and greatest technology, which would potentially last ten years into the future, said Adametz.
The three RBCs making up Project Stryker, backed by an 18.5 million investment, are strategically located eight hours apart to create a follow-the-sun' broadcast model to support live esports productions 24/7/365 for the Riot Games Esports Technology Group (ETG). During a live esports event, a small contributor kit onsite sends live feeds back to the RBC through Riot Direct, the global private internet service provider powering every Riot game packet for every player around the world. The feeds are then routed to control rooms for show productions across multiple languages.
View of one of the six production control rooms in the facility
In addition to content production, each RBC will also serve as a centralised storage and shipping location for global competition hardware, prioritizing quality control for products used by esports pros at Riot's global esports events. Content storage is another element of Project Stryker with each geographic location also housing a data centre and media content vault where content is archived correctly for future discovery and viewing.
The Dublin RBC will generate over 6,300 broadcast production hours annually. The facility, located in a former nightclub in Swords close to Dublin Airport and Dublin Port, is Riot's second footprint in Dublin, joining its city centre office with 165 employees specializing in business operations, localization and player support. It is expected the new RBC will create a further 120 jobs in Dublin.
Project Stryker Dublin executed its first global event earlier this month with Wild Rift Icons, and is currently supporting VALORANT Masters 2 now underway in Copenhagen. The next RBC is currently in development in Des Moines, Washington (in the greater Seattle area) with an estimated completion date of early 2023. The third RBC will be located in the APAC and is slated for full operations by Q1 2024.
A Riot Games partner since 2020, Cisco's partnership is key in helping Riot Esports modernize its infrastructure and expand capacity for new titles and ideas with its Cisco IP Fabric for Media for the entire network stack. As part of a new global partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced this week, Project Stryker is now Powered by AWS' as its official Cloud Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud Machine Learning (ML), Cloud Deep Learning (DL), and Cloud Services provider.
Riot worked with systems integrator NTC (National Teleconsultants) to create the fully IP-based facility in Dublin. Built on SMPTE ST 2110 standards with heavy use of JPEG XS compression, the Dublin RBC provides Riot the flexibility for future expansion.
We can have parallel productions one being done on a frame in a data centre and another being done in a virtual private cloud on an instance - and have identical outputs
Nevion is providing the solution to orchestrate media flows between the remote venues and the RBC, across Riot's Riot Direct WAN. This is built around the Virtuouso software-defined media node and VideoIPath orchestration and SDN control software.
The Virtuosos will be deployed in the SMPTE ST 2110 enabled data centres, and in the mobile contribution kits to be taken to event locations as needed. The media nodes will provide several media functions to transport flows across the network, including SDI/SMPTE ST 2110 adaption, JPEG XS low latency video compression, MADI processing and transport and IPME (IP media edge) functio
