FEED: In 2020, most sports struggled, but esports continued to boom. What has been your experience of broadcasting esports over the past year?
LASSE KEMPF: All the events and people we worked with were told there would be no more productions. But BLASTTV came to us on the technology team and said: “You’ll figure this out, right? Players can just play from home.”We asked: “Can we limit the scope? Maybe make it a bit easier on ourselves?”They said: “No.We want feeds from every single player, we want all the bells and whistles.You have two months. Make it happen.”
Esport came from a background where people didn’t have money to buy real equipment. It started out very scrappy. So, we went back to that and did all the things you’re not supposed to, but did it to a standard where it was usable for production. We used a lot of commercially available tools, and those maybe not intended for broadcast purpose.We had a room of 60-70 computers taking in feeds from all over the world – player cams, talent, everything. We ran two shows in June, and fitted a Dota event in-between. Now that it was online, why not throw in a new event and an extra game? For those shows, we rented an OB truck, but invested in our own fly pack and built our own solution for the next shows in October. It’s been a big year for us. “BLASTTV CAMETO USAND SAID: ‘WEWANTALLTHE BELLSANDWHISTLES. YOU HAVETWO MONTHS. MAKE IT HAPPEN’”
FEED: Were you surprised at how much you were able to do?
LASSE KEMPF: We were surprised that with new tools and new ways of thinking, we could get latency quite low. It showed us you can put together a premium experience without having all the normal studio facilities. And it showed us a model that could be interesting, post-corona. The rest of the industry is watching esports. Other professionals are starting to use new browser- based tools like vMix. Normally, a professional broadcaster needs the biggest and best. But, suddenly, not being in the studio, they couldn’t.
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