ONCE YOU GO DIGITAL, IT’S VERY DIFFICULT TO UNDO THAT. GOING FORWARD, WE’RE LOOKING AT SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS
“On a typical show, we have more than 100 individual feeds that are moving around the venue. This year, we had to do the same number of feeds, but to people’s homes and spread all over the world.” To ensure all production partners had the same capacity, and were equipped with the same resources to do their jobs, Riot’s North American operation collaborated with its Oceanic branch on a solution – their own internal streamer application. “We essentially had to build our own internal content delivery network that gives people the functionality to pick any source, any camera, and watch it from the safety of their home,” says Adametz. “We called it the Worlds Streamer – it’s a web-based interface that allows you to see all the feeds and enables you to select a multi-view that suits you,” he adds.
and shoutcasters and the multi-view feeds to the production crew. “Nimble has been one of the big pluses from all this,” says Adametz. “It’s a streaming software that takes streams in and distributes them across the globe. We’ve used it before, but this year it’s the reason the show could be done remotely,” he says. According to Adametz, another ‘big win’ for the production was the introduction of JPEG XS video codecs into the 2019 Worlds tournament. “We were the first to try JPEG XS, a new way to move video and audio that leads to lower latency and higher quality production. We’ve now standardised this as part of the production.” To eliminate latency for the players themselves, Riot ships over gaming servers to the venue, under close watch by security guards. This year, the servers resided in a data centre in Shanghai near the facility, as bringing the servers on-site was not possible. “So, that’s near zero latency, but not zero,” he says. These gaming servers are also used to automatically generate live statistics – a key component of the experience for esports fans. “We take those stats at a very high granularity and put it into a stats pipeline in the cloud that distributes it to stats partners all around the world. Then, we can trigger things like awesome overlays. As a fan, you can see these live stats constantly updating via the video window.” Adametz adds that Riot’s digital team has been working directly with Twitch and YouTube on several fan integrations that reward the viewers who would otherwise have been cheering in stadiums. “We had worked very hard to enable drops [rewards you can gather as you watch]. More than 100,000 fans received these drops. Fans could insert their own messages and there was also a cheering section – that produced real engagement, even when you weren’t able to be in the stands holding up a sign to support your team.” According to Adametz, Riot’s approach to building its infrastructure has changed due to the pandemic. “We’ve already pivoted a lot of our plans for projects within our five-year road map because of Covid. We can’t take for granted that we will be able to work together in a single room,” he says. “We have to think more virtually. Riot’s never been hardware-first, but certainly not now. Once you go digital, it’s very difficult to undo that. Going forward, we’re looking at software solutions, things that can be virtualised or run in public cloud.” And for those who don’t already know, South Korea’s Damwon Gaming took the Worlds 2020 title, beating Suning Gaming of China in the final.
Local partners decide what they need and the streamer uses the open source streaming protocol SRT to achieve a reliable but secure transport. “This means that if there’s any packet loss it can repair. If you’re running out of bandwidth on your home internet, you can downsize the number of views you pick until you find the amount that gives you what you need – but never any more as this would saturate your bandwidth,” Adametz explains. NIMBLE WORKFLOWS At the centre of Riot’s virtual production system are two virtual video switchers running in Amazon Cloud. The primary switcher is for recording, host cams, observer feeds and graphics; the second handles audio, record and playout, including the master audio mix, video packages and recording. All this can be spun up to the cloud in a few clicks. The outputs are sent to Nimble Streamer, a software media server running in the cloud that handles the distribution to viewers (via its distribution partners). The program feeds to referees
@feedzinesocial
Powered by FlippingBook