Welcome to the world of live streaming.

When you are broadcasting sporting events, having access to a quality live sports streaming setup can open up new avenues for reaching your audience and engaging with your community. Starting from scratch can be a daunting prospect. We can help you understand the basics, and offer suggestions that will help you establish a successful, affordable live streaming setup.

Wirecast is one of the most popular live production solutions for streaming sports. Used in big games at major sporting facilities with tens of thousands of viewers, all the way down to youth league soccer games on the weekend, Wirecast is versatile enough to handle the demands of any sport or production workflow.

Whether you are a solo operator, or you have a large team to help you film and call the game, Wirecast is packed with features designed to make your sports streams look and sound great. Use the built-in timers, clocks, stopwatches, scoreboards and Instant Replay feature to add professionalism to any live stream.

For FOX Sports’ World Cup operations, 22 Telestream Lightspeed Live Capture systems support camera ISOs and other feeds not dedicated to the match, allowing the team to fully capture all event-related content into the content management system. Four feeds will route high-res content directly to the Los Angeles production facility via Aspera FASPStream for editing in near-real-time.

The Lightspeed Live units, combined with Telestream's Vantage transcoding and workflows, provide direct delivery of professional production formats so that the content arrives “ready to work” in Los Angeles. The editorial and production systems there can directly receive a full-resolution captured video with very low latency, meaning fewer on-site edit and production systems are required.

Background.

The Lacrosse Network (TLN) is a sports broadcast network for the digital age. TLN describes itself as a broadcast aggregator and distributor of lacrosse games that may be viewed live or on demand. They also deliver lacrosse documentaries, Q&A interview shows with players and fans, a live news show called The Lacrosse News and a news and analysis show called TLN News. While launching a traditional broadcast sports network devoted to lacrosse was cost-prohibitive, The Lacrosse Network found it could reach a global audience affordably by streaming media via the YouTube Live online platform.

Today, the network has agreements to Webcast games played by major lacrosse leagues and organizations including National Lacrosse League (NLL), Major League Lacrosse (MLL), Men’s Collegiate Lacrosse Association (MCLA 1 & 2), Travelling All-Stars (LXM Pro), NCAA College Lacrosse Division I and III. TLN also carries tournaments, special lacrosse events and high school lacrosse matches. The network estimates that its total audience is close to 210,000+ subscribers across their Multi-Channel Network (MCN) of 25 digital channels

Challenge.

The biggest challenge for The Lacrosse Network is that the games must be shot on-site and the video backhauled to TLN’s Los Angeles studios. To aggregate this content, TLN takes feeds from producers, leagues and other parties whose video production capabilities vary greatly.

In some cases, the on-site production team is capable of producing a multi-camera HD show complete with play-by-play/color announcing, graphics, effects, text and other enhancements. But in other cases, like high school lacrosse games, TLN just receives the raw video from the local camera(s).

Solution.

Based on a recommendation from YouTube’s sports team, The Lacrosse Network realized that Wirecast software combined the broadcast-quality production tools, encoding and streaming capabilities they needed. More importantly, this user-friendly, cross platform software was economical enough to deploy to any local production team that needed it.

Wirecast encodes and sends a stream to TLN that’s ready to be passed on to YouTube. Production elements like graphics and text can be added with Wirecast’s integrated production tools before pushing it along to YouTube.