LTN Live Video Cloud: ESL

Live signal distribution: How esports giant ESL distributes PGM signals and clean feeds to millions of viewers and sub-production houses

ESL uses routing capabilities of Live Video Cloud (LVC) to distribute live signals from their esports events to reach millions of concurrent viewers across different platforms and to provide clean feeds to sub-production houses.

Challenge

With the mission to make esports as ubiquitous as other sports, ESL was challenged by the rise of streaming platforms, diversified audiences in different regions around the globe, and on-site bandwidth limitations.

Workflow

The on-site production is done with broadcast-grade TV equipment and encoded with software or hardware encoders. However, some events take place in regions where reliable broadband internet connections are still improving. Instead of delivering live signals separately to each destination, ESL ingests broadcast signals once into LVC’s cloud infrastructure. Broadcast signals and cleanfeeds are then routed and distributed to several live platforms like Twitch, YouTube Live, and Twitter Live; or to sub-production houses, broadcast stations, and CDNs.

Depending on the needs per destination, the signals are passed through natively or transcoded within LVC to enable the best possible quality on each destination platform. Live events often must adapt to unpredictable scheduling changes, and LVC helps ESL remain flexible by making it easy to reroute input signals or add and remove new destinations without interruptions, even while live.

Result

During ESL One Cologne 2017, online and linear viewership clocked in at over 62 million sessions with 13 million hours of consumed live video content. During ESL One Cologne in 2018, online and linear viewership brought 31 million hours of consumed live video content. Air time that weekend was 52 hours, and viewership peaked at 746,000. The on-site team produced the English stream and sub-production houses around the globe broadcasted content using provided clean feeds for their regional audiences.

LTN Live Video Cloud enabled ESL to continuously overcome on-site bandwidth limitations and cost-effectively distribute live signals.

With a lot of new partners moving into the esports business, we need solutions to get them on board. Using Live Video Cloud enables us to provide pretty fast and uncomplicated live feeds. It’s still the beginning of the whole esports journey and our goal is to get esports all over the world.

-Chris Müller, Managing Director, ESL TV

About ESL

ESL, a part of the international digital entertainment group MTG, is the world’s largest esports company, leading the industry across the most popular video games with numerous online and offline competitions. It operates high-profile, branded international and national leagues and tournaments such as the Intel® Extreme Masters, ESL One, ESL National Championships, and other top tier stadium-size events, as well as grassroots amateur cups, leagues, and matchmaking systems. ESL covers a broad field of services in gaming technology, event management, advertising, and television production, fully catering to the needs of the esports ecosystem.