Punching Above Its Weight: How the National Lacrosse League's Centralized Production Elevates Live Game Broadcast BitFire Networks transmission solutions make the NLL an efficient machine of video delivery By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital
Wednesday, March 30, 2022 - 11:05 am
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For small to midsize professional sports leagues in the U.S., it's no longer a competitive advantage to have all your games broadcast or streamed live; it's a necessity.
The National Lacrosse League has establish a REMI-based production workflow to produce all of its games for distribution across ESPN in the United States. The games are produced largely by crews in centralized production facilities. Freedom Broadcast Group (pictured) in Clifton Park, New Jersey is one of those facilities.
That's what makes this season one of the most important in the history of the National Lacrosse League (NLL), a professional men's box-lacrosse league that launched in 1987. Up to 139 games - regular-season and playoff - are produced and distributed via a centralized-production model established by the league to meet the demands of a new live-rights agreement under which all games stream on ESPN in the U.S. and the TSN app in Canada.
To be able to execute on these breakthrough deals, says Joel Feld, EVP, broadcast and content, NLL, we had to create a production model that could effectively and efficiently distribute those games. It's a very extensive and complex offering that we are producing and distributing.
Establishing the Infrastructure Feld - a veteran of sports production with a long list of successes at ABC Sports, CSTV (now CBS Sports Network), NESN, and ONE World Sports - joined the league in 2018 and, over the past year, has helped spearhead a league-operated live REMI production model for the league's entire schedule of games.
The operational plan established three centralized-production partners: Freedom Broadcast Group (in Clifton Park, NJ) and Dragonfli Media Technologies (Salt Lake City) serve as REMI production hubs, and Dome Productions (Toronto) produces games in Canada via both a traditional model featuring onsite trucks for TSN's linear NLL Game of the Week and a remote productions based in Toronto.
For a REMI production in the U.S., a minimal crew - camera operators, a couple of techs, on-air talent - captures the images and sound in the arena and pushes feeds to a control room at one of the production facilities, which house the producer, director, TD, graphics and replay ops, A1, and other members of the crew.
Budgets no longer support spending $50,000-$75,000 on producing, say, a mid-tier college basketball game, said Ed Derse, broadcast-operations and -technology advisor to the NLL, in an interview with Sports Business Journal last month. How do we produce at a high level at costs that merit the economics of the situation? That's really the problem that we've been trying to solve from Day 1.
In addition, the cloud-based IP workflow, featuring a transmission-backend infrastructure from BitFire Networks, supports live linear games (of which there are 35 between ESPN and TSN), efficient delivery of video between production facilities and teams, local broadcast partners (approximately 70% of the NLL's live game productions are picked up by a team's in-market broadcast partner), and other key media endpoints.
Resetting the Bar for a New Generation of NLL The task was an ambitious one: the NLL wanted not only to make all its games available via a single distribution partner but also to streamline and elevate the quality of each live game production.
Camera, audio, and comms feeds from NLL venues are fed directly to centralized production facilities where the final program feed is produced. This control room at Dragonfli Media Technologies in Salt Lake City features a full crew producing a live NLL game earlier this year.
Under the league's previous deal - which, in the U.S., delivered matches to Turner Sports' B/R Live app - the individual teams were responsible for production of their home matches. Some of the league's 14 franchises invested in live streaming; some pushed essentially a simulcast feed of the in-venue videoboard show. That inconsistency across the league wasn't going to fly given a new generation of the NLL's rights, according to Feld and Derse. The pair quickly began vetting a centralized production to standardize the look of games across the board but set a a higher standard of production quality.
Fans are becoming more demanding of a quality product that matches what they see when they watch games on television, says Feld. We believe we have achieved that.
A typical NLL game production deploys four manned cameras, with the crew also having access to feeds of any preset cameras used for the in-venue show (the camera on the centerhung videoboard, for example).
Those feeds are pushed to the control rooms at either Freedom Broadcast, Dragonfli, or Dome where the final program feed is assembled.
We set out to produce these games cost-effectively and efficiently in terms of workflow and staffing, says Derse. The NLL is a smaller league that doesn't have a huge broadcast apparatus to pull this off. We wanted to move beyond the way games were produced in the past.
Other key tech for the show includes Flowics, a cloud-based graphics platform. Its architecture can take live scoreboard data and live statistical data off APIs from Sportzcast devices set up in the arenas to feed the broadcast-graphics package and power the scorebug and from the NLL's stats data provider, HockeyTech.
On any given weekend, this workflow serves live production of six or seven games, many of them occurring simultaneously.
The sheer volume of games is the part
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Punching Above Its Weight: How the National Lacrosse League's Centralized Production Elevates Live Game Broadcast BitFire Networks transmission solutions make the NLL an efficient machine of video delivery By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital 
