Super League Gaming Leans Into Digital Gameplay, Remote Production as Audience Grows During Lockdown The amateur-esports organization deploys unique remote-production workflow By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor Thursday, June 4, 2020 - 10:15 am
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Launched in 2014, Super League Gaming originally aimed to bring amateur esports into the spotlight by hosting competitive esports events at venues ranging from movie theaters and malls to Top Golf and Dave & Buster's locations. However, with physical locations shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic, Super League quickly pivoted to online events and creating original content - an effort that has been rewarded with significant audience growth.
Super League Gaming's production crew are located remotely at their homes with its new remote workflow.
Before the pandemic hit, we had a very active business with gameplay experiences at almost 500 physical venues, says Super League Chief Commercial Officer Matt Edelman. That was going extremely well, but we always understood the foundation of our growth was going to be digital. We knew we were going to develop our community long-term by enabling gameplay through digitally connected experiences that are more seamless and scalable than relying solely upon visits to physical venues.
Digital was always a core component, he continues, and the digital foundation that we had already put in place has ended up yielding new opportunities [during the pandemic lockdown].
As Esports Audience Spikes, Super League Ramps Up Content Output
With gamers stuck at home and sports fans left without live events during the pandemic, esports viewership across Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and other outlets has skyrocketed over the past three months as major esports tournaments have continued via online gameplay. In addition, consumption of gameplay highlights on social-media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat has grown exponentially.
Super League has converted several of its physical events to digital experiences and has seen registration numbers accelerate dramatically. In addition, its MineHut community - a Minecraft serving/hosting platform that allows players to create custom environments and invite others to join - has more than tripled since the lockdown began. And, perhaps most notably, Super League has seen significant viewership increases for its user-generated gameplay-highlights channels across Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat.
Super League Gaming's remote-production workflow heavily leverages AWS EC2, NDI and NewTek tools, vMix switching, and Singular.Live graphics.
The viewership of our highlights channels has accelerated beyond what we ever expected, says Edelman. The [MineHut and gameplay-highlights] communities' rapid growth gave us confidence to lean in even more aggressively around digitally based gameplay experiences and original content.
With more eyeballs looking for esports content than ever before, Super League has developed a remote-production model that leverages a combination of AWS EC2 cloud infrastructure and resources at its existing production facility in Santa Monica, CA, to churn out original content and live events at a breakneck pace.
In parallel with our significant digital growth was our fast move to a fully remote content-production and -streaming [model] based on some unique and proprietary technology combined customized workflows integrating multiple systems generally not otherwise designed to work together, says Edelman. As a result, we have been able to scale our content production in a manner that has not been as easy for many companies during this period.
Inside Super League Gaming's Remote-Production Workflow
Remote production is nothing new to Brian Gramo, director, live production and SuperLeagueTV. When he started at Super League in 2018, his Bakersfield-to-Santa Monica commute forced him to stay in his RV in the studio's parking lot during the week. To remedy that situation, he and his team gradually developed a production model that would allow the Super League team to access the Santa Monica local control remotely.
We've now been doing various forms of remote production for about two years, says Gramo. But, when the [lockdown] hit, we ramped it up very quickly. The timeline was fairly rapid: immediately, we started using the existing remote infrastructure that we already had in place, and, within 30 days, we were fully remote.
These days, SuperLeagueTV (SLGTV) is operating a virtual production-control room accessible to multiple producers, technical directors, sound engineers, and other staff. Live streams are recorded simultaneously through a cloud-based infrastructure and made available for distribution to multiple broadcast endpoints in real time, whether for viewing on Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook or for viewing by production staff and talent producing a show to be aired on a future date.
Super League's local studio, which is based on New Tek's NDI IP format, features the vendor's TriCaster TC1 production system, Connect Pro IP video-translation system, and Spark video converters. Shut out of the studio in March, the SuperLeagueTV production team immediately began using a variety of remote-desktop applications (notably, Windows and Chrome) and VPN tools to access resources in the control room.
In addition to remoting into the studio, SuperLeagueTV developed a fully cloud-based workflow in AWS EC2, leveraging the vMix software-based switcher and Singular.Live graphics for live productions. Much of SuperLeague's I/O - including multiviews - are handled with NDI over WAN, providing plenty of flexibility when both the AWS EC2 environment and its Santa Monica control room are used.
We are heavily leveraging NDI over WAN, so we can have source
