By. Scott Grizzle, M.A
Introduction
Perhaps in the days of broadcast the idea of catching your local minor league baseball game or your favorite roller derby bout on TV seemed ludicrous, but the age of streaming video has made it such events to the point where anyone with the right equipment can broadcast and publish their sporting events for all the world to see.
We've all grown used to the idea of streaming major sporting events like the Olympics or Major League Sports, but the cost of delivering content online has dropped to the point where even local sports teams can afford to stream their events to their fans around the world. Live streaming sporting events can serve as a way to promote the event, connected distant fans, and create a permanent archive of past events. It's even possible to monetize the event in order to offset the costs associated with streaming.
This paper with highlight the equipment and services required to set up and offer your own live streaming offering for your local sports team or league and walk through the best practices to offer a premium experience.
Why Stream?
There are a number of reasons why you may want to stream your event. An obvious one is to allow remote fans to participate. Just because your team or league may not be the New York Yankees doesn't mean all of your fans live within driving distance of your venue; and even if they did, it doesn't mean they all can make it on game day. A streaming option allows those distant fans to connect and watch alongside everyone else. Adding social media elements further allows them to participate. Once these practices are in place, using these to grow the fan base is more than possible it should be the expectation. As you continue to stream games overtime, you are also potentially building an archive of your games (depending on how you choose to host and deliver your events). These archives are useful for fans to catch up or re-watch favorite games, as well as for the team itself to review games. Both of these live and on-demand options can be delivered for free, but fans are often willing to pay (especially if there was a cost associated with attending in person already). There are numerous ways a sporting event can be monetized – through a subscription pay wall or ad supported; a price for the live games or one-time costs for the on demand archives. Most likely your particular model will be a hybrid of these options, offering a low barrier of entry to allow those new to the service to try it out, then pay more as they begin to access more options and view a richer, more premium service.
At a high level, streaming events look very similar, whether it’s a game or a town hall meeting. Camera feeds are combined with graphics by a video switcher, mixed with audio and then fed to a local encoder. This encode creates all the necessary versions for delivering to the end users. These streams are then delivered distribution to the end users. Ideally, this is a service that combines the other services you will need, such as transcoding, HD Streams, advertising capabilities, and the creation of the video player and landing pages that host the content for the end users. But once you go deeper into the production and setup the complexity of every work flow is different. A sporting event in the round it totally different from a town hall for delivery and setup.
Before You Stream (planning) (Step 1)
Before you dive into a streaming event, you'll want to do some planning. Much of the preparation used for planning a live event can be reused for the streaming broadcast, but some extra items such as graphics packaging will also want to be considered in order to make your broadcast look as professional as possible. You'll also want an announcer or host of the online broadcast who can help guide the viewer through the event as well as provide some commentary along the way for action that may not translate visually. If you can afford to have more than one announcer, go for it as the act of them conversing about the event helps build a narrative for the viewer to follow.
Site surveys are always a great idea if doing these streams occasionally versus doing a permanent installation of equipment. Knowing the layout of the location for camera planning and cabling before the day of setup will help with time and making sure everything is perfect. The time of the event is crucial too. Reason is because the time of day can cause unforeseen issues. Like a sunset where the sun glare makes a camera view unusable. Or wind picks up and can cause issues with Audio.
Camera location (step 2)
Having multiple cameras isn't always a requirement, but it is useful in being able to quickly follow the action. Rather than trying to follow a constantly moving and zooming camera (which will lead to viewer fatigue). Camera angles should be cleanly switched between multiple cameras covering the sporting event, making it possible to follow the action more easily. Plus done in a way to make the viewer feel they are part of the action.
Cameras should be stationed to allow for the widest possible coverage as well as include a wide angle "master shot" that can be used when not tracking a specific play or things like time outs occur. Play your camera angles as much as possible before hand, but be prepared to tweak it when on site. Also provide a way for camera people to communicate with one another (via an ifb[1]) and the master control (producer/director) so that they are aware when their camera is "live" and allowing the director to request the person re-frame or change shots.
When setting up the cameras it’s important to know the axis of action. You never want to cross the axis of action. This makes the viewer experience basically unwatchable and is very confusing for the viewer to follow. The action should always be coming towards or away from the camera. Its not that hard to set up stationary camera basically with the flow of traffic if you don't have enough camera operators or experienced operators. With sporting events that are considered in the round (racing, roller derby, etc...) This flowing camera shot will help reduce viewer fatigue and basically make the viewer feel like they are in the race or event.
What You Need Onsite (step3)
Somewhere between planning and production, you need to verify you have enough bandwidth to deliver the event. You will want access to a dedicated network connection. Everyone has different methods for calculating bandwidth needs, but as a rule of thumb, having you total deliverable bandwidth be double of your overall throughput is ideal. In other words, if you were planning on delivering a total of 3 Mbps of content, a 6 Mbps upload should suffice. Backup bandwidth, in the form of bonded wireless data access points (such as Teradek’s Bond, or Intelsat’s products) are also useful as network connections have a way of failing at the least opportune time.
Once you get onsite, much of the work is familiar to any live video production. All the cameras feeds and audio, along with graphics are fed to a switcher that create a master stream or feed that will be the finished ready for delivery stream. This is then fed to the onsite Video Encoder to do the work of creating the streams that will be delivered to the video platform.
There are a variety of encoder lines than have a number of options available to meet your needs. From single to multichannel input appliances that accept everything from analog, SDI, NDI, HDMI, or even IP based inputs; there is an appliance that meets your needs and price point.
Knowing your Audience
What formats and qualities you offer will impact who and how your fans connect to your event. Unlike a traditional broadcast where a single feed is used to deliver, streaming events offer a highly personalized viewing experience by allowing you to customize the resolutions your viewers will use to connect to your content. The types of devices you expect them to use will also impact what formats you choose to create. Targeting highly popular devices such as iPhones and iPads, along with some streams targeted towards desktop or laptop viewers will give your fans a wide range viewing experiences to experiment with to find what is right for them.
So knowing your audience is a must. Who are they and how or where will they be viewing? Content is King but the delivery is the Castle. Without the Audience you have no one to watch your content. If you can’t get it to them, then you are just blowing smoke and your event will be all flash and no real viewership. Reaching your audience is a must for any sporting event. Like Audience in the stands it important to get them as viewers or you will never grow.
What You Need Offsite (step 4)
Like the onsite elements, what you choose to use offsite will offer a variety of different viewing experiences to the viewers. At minimum you'll want to have a streaming service available that can act as a relay of the published stream to end-users. By using a streaming service, less bandwidth and activity between the onsite location and your viewers will ensure a more stable connection and provide an overall better viewing experience. Depending on which service you implement, you can also provide a wider variety of resolutions and formats than you are creating onsite with your encoder. Platforms like Watson Media offer the ability to transcode the existing streams into other formats used by iPhones and tablets. While using a video platform it can be relatively inexpensive, this route leaves lots of possibilities to your project.
Encoding Best Practices (step 5)
In the early days, there were only a couple of codecs, and live and real-time encoding was difficult. We could add filters, but more importantly, they gave us control of contrast. So there are some basic tricks everyone should know. When doing sports you will need to bump up your bitrates significantly over the standard talking head shots. If you were typically doing a Talking Head or 2 shot at 720p 2.5Mbps you will probably want to double that to 5Mbps. That will give a very clean and crisp look. However depending on the type of sports and the speed of play you can get that down to 3.5Mbps. This is of course using h.264 compression.
Conclusion
There is a plethora of ways to pull off a live stream of your event. There only two real variables are how much money you wish to spend and how in depth with the technology you wish to be. If desired, the entire event could be farmed out to a third party company who could handle everything from the filming and streaming onsite to the hosting and monetization services delivering content to your viewers. But this can be a costly approach as well, leading many to attempt to take on as much of the process as possible. The reality is that as you start a new live streaming event, it may be easier to have someone familiar with the pitfalls on hand, so establishing a relationship with professionals familiar with streaming media is vital.
In this day and age, anyone can take advantage of affordable, high quality streaming to provide their live sporting events to a worldwide audience. By following the suggestions outlined above, you can offer a highly professional extension of your live event creating a way for it to live outside the one-time local event. You are left with a digital extension of your sports franchise - a way for fans to connect online and to enjoy the events, even from afar. By combining such interactions with social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, an even deeper experience can be provided.
[1] Interruptible feedback is a device that like a closed circuit walkie talkie to all production crew to communicate with each other. However usually only the producer or director should ever really be talking
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