The European Football League prepares a remote production infrastructure in the cloud with AWS

To accommodate an increasing volume of match broadcasts over networks, streamline production and ensure a high-quality, low-latency experience for viewers, the European Football League (ELF) implements an infrastructure for remote production in the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Along with Novel Media, production and streaming partner of the ELF, and AWS LOGIC Media Solutions, an Amazon Web Services partner, AWS helped create a cost-effective cloud-based remote production pipeline for the league in less than three weeks, just before the start of the 2023 season in June. This collaboration is the first of its kind for a pan-European sports league.

ELF's desire to improve scalability and while reducing production costs and your carbon footprint drove all aspects of the team's design, as well as ensuring a consistent, top-notch viewer experience. The resulting infrastructure combines a wide range of AWS services with 4G/5G signal transmission and signal distribution to partner over-the-top (OTT) technologies. By reducing the volume of team travel and transport between match venues in Europe by 76 matches, the ELF expects to save more than 300 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

“The European Football League is on track to reach more than 500 million homes around the world, so the scalability provided by AWS-powered infrastructure is not only paramount today, but will also make it easier for us to support continued growth and launch new features for viewers in the future,” he shares. Zeljko Karajica, executive director of the European Football League. “It is also helping us reduce our carbon footprint as we can significantly cut the volume of OB truck travel and equipment that productions of this caliber typically require.”

A solid cloud foundation

With multiple parties involved, the underlying architecture of ELF's cloud-based remote production pipeline is robust. AWS services form the backbone of the infrastructure, including instances of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) that support production in a reliable, scalable way and with great performance. Several different blocks of solutions, including 4G/5G signal transmission and OTT signal distribution, were orchestrated by AWS, Novel Media and Logic Media for streamlined integration.

The pipeline also includes Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for scalable block and object storage; AWS Elemental MediaConnect for secure and reliable transport of live video; AWS Elemental MediaConvert for file-based video transcoding; and the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN) for content distribution.

AWS, Novel Media and LOGIC media designed the architecture to support different signal variants depending on the needs of the parties. For the most anticipated matches, two different signals are produced. These include a graphics-only version of the global broadcast, which is sent to a local station that inserts presenters and “L” frames. Delivered via ELF's OTT service, the second feed for these matches is available in four languages, each with ambient sound, and features ELF, Czech or Polish presenters.

Standard match broadcasts include up to four signals per production. The first is a version of the global feed distributed to ran.de, which contains graphics, some with presenter but without inserts/clips, and supports audio in four languages ​​and ambient sound. Another signal is sent to the ELF OTT platform with ELF presenters, Czech or Polish, and virtual inserts of the partners playing on the field in up to four languages ​​with ambient sound. For matches involving the Wroclaw Panthers or the Prague Lions, a similar signal is sent to ELF's OTT platform and to a Polish or Czech broadcaster, respectively.

“What ELF has achieved in just three weeks with AWS is incredible, and a testament to the power of the cloud,” he highlights. Marc Aldrich, director general de Global Media & Entertainment en AWS. “La experiencia del aficionado es fundamental para cualquier producción deportiva y, al trasladar su proceso de producción a la nube, ELF podrá crear retransmisiones de partidos más memorables que permitan a los aficionados sumergirse más en el juego. Estamos impacientes por ver cómo sigue evolucionando esta arquitectura, así como lo que permite.”