FEED: Telstra works to provide infrastructure, which makes these kinds of remotely produced events happen. Anna, what has Telstra seen over the past year in terms of esports?
ANNA LOCKWOOD: Telstra is very involved in esports events, but we also provide a lot of underlying infrastructure for gaming companies and publishers. On the network side, there was a large spike in gaming.The usage requirements for publishers, gamers and streamers all went up significantly, and stayed up. On broadcast services, we saw that esports, like other events, were affected by the pandemic because they couldn’t do those in-person mega-events. But esports has the advantage of being digital-native and cloud-native. Many people we work with were running successful online tournaments before they got into stadium events.They could pivot quite quickly back to hosting online events. In some countries, the stadium experience was able to come back, even if the stadiums weren’t completely full.We used remote production, with the talent and production people in centralised hubs in a different part of a country, or a different country altogether.The esports producers really pushed the remote production envelope.They asked, “How can we use high bandwidth, low latency networks, to produce a massive event out of China or Malta?” And they pulled it off.
“NEW BROADCAST RIGHTS MONEY IS GOINGTO SHAKE THINGS UPAND CAUSETHE INDUSTRYTO GROW UP VERY FAST”
FEED: Cameron, you were brought into Ross Video as the new esports business development manager. Was the pressure on?
CAMERON REED: A huge part of Ross Video’s business is sports and live events. Our products are used by the large venue control space, and Ross Production Services serves sports and live events. I was like the new kid on campus and, at the beginning of 2020, people were asking, “What’s going to happen with esports?” My answer was that tournaments are going to happen one way or another – 90% are online anyway.There are the Riot Games and Blizzards of the world that will play in-person in a LAN environment, but that doesn’t represent the bulk of esports. Most is mid-size, or smaller events online for eight to ten weeks, before one large event. We predicted ratings would go through the
roof. The question was: “How are we going to get the coverage?” So, Ross worked on a solution where the way we distribute content could also be used as a way to contribute content into a workflow.They came up with the Ross Production Cloud, allowing low-latency streaming back and forth – not only contributing audio and video from talent or players, but also streaming back multiviewers, comms and control over production devices. Our first show using the solution was in late-April. And out of our greatest moment of fear came amazing triumph.
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