Esports is embracing high-quality broadcast tools in a big way, and with other sports hamstrung, pro gaming has been creating pro content
lobal esports media network Blast is one of the growing number of esports companies that are set on being able to produce their own high-quality broadcast content in-house. To do this,
and featured the world’s top Counter-Strike teams. The live coverage was distributed on OTT streams like Twitch and YouTube, as well linear TV channels including TV 2 Denmark and TV 2 Norway. The series was followed by the Blast Premier Fall
Blast uses EVS’ VIA and Media Infrastructure solutions as the backbone of its new esports production flypack. While other sports teams have been driven off the pitch this past year, esports – built on a foundation of pure digital – has been able to survive and even boom. “Traditional sports started with linear broadcast and started to adopt streaming. Esports started with digital and streaming and now it is moving to broadcast,” notes Guillaume Neveux, EVS’ business development manager for EMEA. “EVS is in the middle of that. We just provide the technology to generate content and help people do the best storytelling they can with that content. For us, we are agnostic about how you distribute – whether on linear TV, an OTT platform, social media or a second screen.” Using its new EVS-powered broadcast workflow, Blast has produced its own online-only live events, which launched with the Blast Premier Fall series, running from 26 October to 4 November last year,
Showdown, the Blast Premier Final and another round of competitions at the beginning of this year. “The expertise EVS accumulated over the years, providing live production kit to traditional sports, put us in a privileged situation when esports started to look at how it could get more quality into the productions. It began to look at what was done in traditional sports.” Powering the live-action coverage of all Blast Premier Counter-Strike tournaments is EVS’ XT-VIA and XS- VIA production servers. The XT-VIA allowed Blast to record and produce
WE WERE THE FIRST TO DO LIVE SLOWMOTION FOR COUNTER- STRIKE
live replays and highlights from the players and observers, while the XS-VIA servers provided ingest and delayed playout of the TX feeds to comply with betting requirements. The XT-VIA solution includes 36 Full HD 1080p channels recording all player feeds,
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