11 minute read
Overwatch League
Blizzard Entertainment is a developer of well-known videogames like Diablo, Overwatch and Warcraft. During the last years, the company has made a bet on esports with tournaments and massive venues around the globe, which includes the Overwatch League, the world’s first city-based esports league with 20 teams based all over the world. With the pandemic freezing those events, they were prepared with an alternative option to continue their broadcast activity, and in 2017 decided to move its production to an on-cloud workflow. Corey Smith, Director of Live Operations and Global Broadcast at Blizzard tells us a bit more about this process.
Corey Smith, Director of Live Operations and Global Broadcast at Blizzard
Pandemic forced you to move to a remote production very quickly. How did you make this change? How is your workflow currently?
The pandemic was interesting because in 2017, we made the decision to decouple ourselves from traditional streaming providers as an outsourced model. We were going to take all the knowledge that we had been gathering and go to cloud with our distribution, transmission systems, asset management and all our line records.
We started building the majority of our transmission infrastructure in cloud, while we were still based in our Blizzard Arena in Los Angeles. We had the entire television studio accompaniment already at that facility as a purpose-built esports arena. In late 2019, when we started seeing the beginning of the pandemic and how events like NAB were cancelled, we were like: "Oh my, this thing is real."
It was a pretty big concern we were tracking. By the time March 2020 came around, Los Angeles County essentially closed down and we all shifted to work from home. I haven't been back to the office since March 12 of last year. That's a long time to work remote.. We had set ourselves up for success though because of our partnership with Grass Valley, which goes back to 2018. All of our transmission work and other distribution systems being in the cloud previously AMPP became a very easy complement to our existing platform.
Basically, we took the physical studio venue environment and deployed it in the cloud. The only thing we really had to figure out then were the issues with the casters and the talent in the field. The deal with consumer internet latency and upload speed is a very
APAC Virtual Set.
WE TOOK THE PHYSICAL STUDIO VENUE ENVIRONMENT AND WE THREW IT UP IN THE CLOUD. THE ONLY THING WE REALLY HAD TO FIGURE OUT THEN WERE THE ISSUES WITH THE CASTERS AND THE TALENT IN THE FIELD TO DEAL WITH THEIR LATENCY AND UPLOAD SPEED.
real problem. The consumer internet infrastructure in the United States has high download and little upload. It's not an asynchronous circuit but a consumer-grade internet. You can't normally get commercial grade in most places and that was part of the issues we had to overcome. Most of the time we spent in March and April, we spent trying to get back online and figuring out those talent kits in the field.
How did your people adapt to this new workflow?
Most of the workflow is very similar to a normal hardware control surface. It's just the nuance of clicking buttons with a mouse now as opposed to actually sitting at a console. The workflow is very similar in terms of how you cut production at a physical studio, but they just happened to be managing control surfaces that control our cloud infrastructure.
You partnered with Grass Valley to develop AMPP, your cloud software platform. What can you do with this platform? How long did it take you to develop it?
We've been working with Grass Valley from 2018. Now we have a full audio production suite and the ability to do short-form video playout as a replay mechanism. We've attached some of our infrastructure to it. Our graphics engine is basically an NDI feed into the system via Vizrt and we run Trio on the cloud. In terms of the full AMPP ecosystem, it's basically what you would have at a physical production venue. You could take your KFrame switcher and attach it to cloud and manage your show, just like our A1 is currently doing now.
By the time we will get back to a truck world, we can take some of that infrastructure that people have already spent money on to achieve greater ROI. We want to take the investments made in
hardware and attach it to our cloud-based infrastructure.
The crewing of those trucks is very tuned for that hardware and the nuances around mobile production. It’s critically important for us as leaders in the industry to not disrupt the workflow of the existing crew and what they're capable of doing. Nobody wants to roll up a truck and then have to retrain or hire specialty staff to operate a new piece of gear or software. Part of that whole journey for us was to not be intrusive on the market that operators weren't available to run it. That was our journey with Grass Valley. We have not skipped a beat in terms of being able to take our studio show and do it in the cloud.
Speaking of cloud, what can you tell us about the Aloha Project?
Project Aloha is our solution to enable regular play between our teams based in North America and our teams based in Asia. During the Overwatch League’s tournament cycles, the best North America teams fly to Hawaii, and utilizing an undersea fiber connectivity, we’re able to connect those teams directly to an online-based game server in Tokyo that our teams in Asia also connect to.
What does it take to make this happen? A lot of research went into
figuring out the best location we would benefit in sending players. A series of network investigations finally led us to team up with the University of Hawaii. The University is well positioned from an internet perspective to take advantage of the undersea fiber infrastructure that allowed us to connect directly with our game servers in Tokyo. Measurable latency needed to be under 100ms for competitive game play to occur.
Producer workstation.
Outside of the cloud platform, what tools do you use for production?
There's not really a whole lot else we use outside of our AWS cloud environment. There are some partners along the way that help us externally with some of the POV camera work, but for the most part, everything we do is 100% cloud across the board.
RCS Overwatch League custom control application.
What is the equipment of your remote production studios?
The talent cameras are basically the Sony A7s. The NUC gives us the ability to remote into those boxes and camera shading. We can change the look, the feel, the colour balance, the gain, the saturation, everything you can do on local camera
We've set it up this season to remote in and operate that type of stuff at the talent homes, which has worked out pretty well. The cameras at the venue have been a combination of Sony and Grass Valley from time to time depending on the production partner. Each one of them has different cameras they use, what our requirements are and what's available.
As in any sports broadcast, the use of
Observer workstation.
Engineering workstation.
replays that highlight the most important or spectacular plays is common. How do you do it?
There's a couple of different ways of doing replay. Right now we have a line record within vMix. We use that to turn those clips around and act as any source for playback for the show, and it's working out pretty well.
We're looking forward to continuing to drive the evolution of the cloudbased video production workflow to also include high value video replay, whether it's through GV making advances to AMPP for those features or whatever happens down the road with our other technology partners.
Graphics are of great importance in production. What system do you use? Do you introduce any element of augmented reality or virtual reality?
We have a virtual set currently. We work with RCSand they have helped us to develop some of those sets for the last couple seasons. We're going to continue with that enhancement and maybe even go the XR route.
I'm a big fan of the extended reality stuff right now, where you can build a 3D space instead of living in a 2D world. You can be more dynamic than just having folks sitting
behind a desk and having that flat feel. I think that the world needs to feel like they've opened up and evolved and be able to have the talent walking around a set, to feel like there is depth of space.
In terms of the graphics capabilities, we have a couple of different layers in which we deploy in our environment, depending on which league. We also deploy on more of our master control environment with the use of Singular, which is an HTML5 graphics rendering that happens as we decorate the distribution feeds. You could think of distribution feeds as we're providing a world feed, but on top of that, we're providing different feeds in Korean, French, German, Spanish… and the ads that are playing in that, what we call split fork execution, is basically dirtied at the master control level, where we have one input coming in and we have multiple inputs going out.
Where you would see an English billboard for one sponsor, on the Korean feed, you'd see that same billboard localized in Korean, or German, or French, or Spanish. We have a way to actually internationalize our broadcast to those specific regions with specific feeds, with specific ad inventory based on some of the singular work we've done.
And for statistics, what system do you use? In what processes are you using AI?
There are a couple of different stats systems. Over the last several years, we've been developing our own stats platform internally. The stats system ties into the game engine. It allows us
to pull the stats directly from the game, interpret the data, and then present it for broadcast.
It feeds into our graphics system as well for use on air and into different analysis dashboards. Our competitive operations team and the other the team coaches can read those dashboards and see how their players and team are performing. It's an in-house development project right now that we've been undertaking
The use of AI right now in our leagues is within the Overwatch League. We've been working on a stats project with IBM. They take the raw data that we give them, they interpret it, figure out different algorithms to apply to the data, and come up with interesting stack rankings. Then, we're able to then those and apply it into the broadcasts in terms of presenting what IBM ranked the player or the team from a statistical standpoint.
WE'VE BEEN DEVELOPING OUR OWN STATS PLATFORM INTERNALLY. THE STATS SYSTEM TIES INTO THE GAME ENGINE. IT ALLOWS US TO PULL THE STATS DIRECTLY FROM THE GAME, INTERPRET THE DATA, AND THEN PRESENT IT FOR BROADCAST.
What do you think about the future of esports?
The challenge is still going to be getting people back to venues 100% and enjoying local sports again, regardless of whether or it's football, baseball, basketball or esports.
We are going to continue to push technology. It’s going to be a hybrid approach either way, whether or not we do any production on site we have to change how we think of venue production. For the most part, a lot of our stuff is going to still be cloud-based. We are still going to assume that we are cutting the show in the cloud and doing distribution the way it’s done today. The YouTube audience, as an example, doesn't really care what's going on at the venue during halftime. This is traditionally what you also
APAC Virtual LED Wall.
see in other sports today. You also want people to walk around and have that social experience at the venue, not to be locked into your seat.
We have to look at how we evolve our production and the league. There are certain elements of traditional sports that we have to take in, but our players aren't really on a traditional field of play, it’s virtual. We have to figure out ways to connect the community and the fans to this virtual world regardless of how we do the broadcast. How do we thread the narratives that get people engaged? That's always going to be the goal and hopefully our tools will continue to help us tell that story.
