Medialooks Provides eSports Giant ESL with Powerful Video Transport Solution

The world's largest eSports company overcomes distance limitations and language difficulties with Medialooks' low-latency remote streaming tool.

Medialooks, a provider of low-latency video transport streaming solutions for remote production, has provided a video transport solution to ESL and its subsidiary ESL Swiss. One of the largest companies dedicated to eSports operates multiple television studios, and is Twitch's largest esports production company, operating branded international leagues and tournaments such as ESL One, Intel Extreme Masters, ESL Pro League and other top-tier stadium-sized events.

ESL Swiss operates from a fully-featured television studio built from the ground up in Bern, Switzerland for the first season of the ESL Swisscom Hero League, a new local championship based on popular titles. Challenged by the dual language situation in Switzerland, ESL turned to Medialooks for a cost-effective production solution that would leverage staff and equipment resources and simultaneously serve Swiss German and French speaking audiences, each in their own language, without having to build twin studios within the same facility. The answer was to connect French talent remotely through Medialooks Video Transport.

ESL's video production-only software consisted of two state-of-the-art computers based on Core i9 processors and equipped with cards Blackmagic Design DeckLink y vMix for video mixing and character generation.

While the Swiss German-speaking commentators were based on site, their French colleagues were in Lausanne, about 120 kilometers from the main studio, in their own recording room with a production PC, a camera and an audio mixer.

Medialooks VT It integrated French production with the same level of quality as that created in Bern. The master feed was sent to Lausanne via a 1 Gbps Swisscom fiber optic connection with the producer's voice embedded, which was used to provide the French team with both the gameplay feed and the producer's instructions. The camera image in front of the commentator was mixed with his audio and transported to Bern with a total of 100 ms delay, almost in real time.

With this configuration, the quality of French production was indistinguishable from that of Swiss German; both were streamed to Twitch and YouTube three times a week during the first season of ESL Swisscom Hero League. ESL has revealed plans to implement the same setup for the second season, which will begin in late summer.

Building on the success of the installation, ESL Italy has deployed the same approach for its own production (which is currently airing): having the commentators in Rome connect to the main control room in Bolzano.