Inside the epic remote production for Riot Games' 2024 League of Legends World Championship Finals

At Riot Games' 2024 League of Legends World Championship Finals, held at the O2 Arena in London on November 2, NEP, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Dublin-based Remote Broadcast served as on-site technical services partners EMG/Gravity Media teams all contribute to an epic remote production. SVG Europe caught up with Alex Rybalko, Broadcast Engineering Manager at Riot Games, and James Wyld, Principal Infrastructure Engineer at Riot Games, to find out more.

Tasks that were previously completed on-site are now handled by Riot Games' Remote Broadcast Centers:

• observer
• Directors
• Technical Directors
• graphic
• producers
• Audio operators

How is the show packaged to and from Dublin?

AR: As this is a remote production, our on-site presence in London is a production van for the opening ceremony part, then we move on to the sports part of the event and that is all done from Dublin. We have two control rooms where we edit the global feed in English, and locally we have four languages ​​(French, English, Chinese, Korean) and eight co-streamers here.

What role does AWS play at Worlds?

AR: The Vertical Feed is a new product that we also offer our co-streamers in addition to the classic broadcast. The core of the vertical feed runs automatically using AWS technologies.

Read more from the fan perspective: Riot Games on creating a superior viewing experience and evolving fans in esports

As a zero-operator production, we can produce a separate, tailored feed from the main show with our own graphics and assets, where we can then dynamically replace various elements, allowing creators and partners to customize their show to truly suit their needs to their specific target group.

When you add the vertical feed, we have over 30 different versions of our broadcast distributed around the world from the Technical Operations Center (TOC) at our Remote Broadcast Center in Dublin. All of this is possible through the use of AWS Media Services technologies.

Jehovah's Witness: On the creative side, we have some specific AWS partnerships that play a big role in this production. One of them is “AWS Win Probability,” where AWS runs a machine learning model for every second of the game to perform binary predictive analysis and find out which team is most likely to win. This is a graphic that is displayed on the screen to viewers at specific times during a game, ultimately helping to improve the viewing experience for fans.

The other is the Global Power Rankings, which were first introduced at the start of the 2024 World Cup. When there are teams everywhere that don't always play against each other, it can be difficult to determine who has the upper hand before the game. AWS helped us develop a model with numerous data inputs based on things like the league's previous history, the relative strengths of teams within each league, and previous international results, to name a few. This is all to create this new ranking system, which creates another element of fan base and chatter and creates more excitement for upcoming games.

Separately on the production side, all operator workstations run on Amazon Workspaces in our Remote Broadcast Centers powered by AWS. Additionally, our distribution pipeline, which we use to compress and deliver broadcast production signals to partners and platforms around the world, runs in the AWS Media Services Suite (AWS Media Connect and Media Live). This allows us to scale our production from a single global feed to 22 language partners around the world.

A Riot Games producer in Dublin working on the 2024 League of Legends Championships finals last weekend

What value does the remote production model you use bring to Riot Games?

Jehovah's Witness: With over 30 variants of World Cup broadcast coming out of the TOC, it's a lot to manage, but we can see the value of the remote production model because everything is anchored in the facility – observers, encoding, the vertical feed- Workflow – We were able to pass this on from show to show throughout the tournament.

Read more from the producer's perspective: Find out all about the 2024 League of Legends World Championship Finals

We started in Berlin about a month ago and this structure was able to remain relatively stable in Dublin. We can move production from Berlin (where the earlier World Cup rounds took place) to Paris (for the semi-finals) without much change at RBC. Then we come to the finale in London, where the production is already set up from Paris. We will have to make some adjustments, such as adding an on-site production truck for the opening ceremony, but the core sports production can remain relatively the same in one location rather than being broken up and built up throughout the different phases of the event.

AR: Basically, any position that you would traditionally see in an on-site production truck can now be located out of the RBC. We run a hybrid operation because sometimes it still makes sense to have a specific role at the event on site, but the underlying platform and technology on which everything is built allows us to be flexible.

Facts about Riot Games' 2024 League of Legends World Championship Finals:

• 72 cameras
• SonyHDC
• Sony Venice
• Sony P50
• Sony FR7
• Sony FX3 and FX6
• Panasonic POV cameras
• Winch camera
• 2 cable camera
• 2 techo cranes
• 4 rail cams
• Arri Trinity Rig
• Jimmy Jib
• 80 transmission lines
• 48 returns
• 256 broadcast audio channels
  

  An observer of the 2024 League of Legends Championships Finals