GOLD COAST, Australia—For more than a decade, the Australian-based co-production involving A Suite Production and Creative Illusion has delivered production services for the annual World Ocean Series (WOS). During that time, we have played a key role in helping the event successfully grow its media output from a simple live wirecast to Facebook and YouTube into a high-quality, livestreamed production distributed to multiple OTT platforms, including 7Plus, Kayo Sports and TVNZ+.
From November to February, we spend 10-plus production days on the beaches of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia livestreaming the WOS, where elite surf sport athletes from across the globe participate in the Ironman-style tournament.
Battling the Tide
Beach environments are tricky terrains—the heat, rain, sand, salt and ocean mist take a toll on equipment. In the early days, we would set up camp with a Windows PC running off a generator and run cables to a single drone and a few “lock-off” static cameras. It wasn’t unusual to have issues with the gear or for computers to overheat. During our first season, we even misjudged the tide in one location and the director ended up ankle deep in water for the entire live stream.
That forced us to reimagine our approach. For the following few series, we decided to hire an OB truck to keep the majority of equipment out of the elements. It was the right thing to do to increase production value and mitigate equipment failure—but the cost and time spent transporting the truck and the crew, coupled with the laborious task of digging trenches for cables, became a significant burden.
Two years ago at a WOS event in Manly, near Sydney, a couple of unfortunate incidents highlighted the vulnerabilities of that approach. After a 900-mile truck journey and another long cable-trench dig along the beach—from the car park to the starting line and commentator platform—an overnight street sweeper accidentally destroyed our fiber lines.
In a panic, we managed to rerun the cables but then, just before airtime, the event was canceled due to sharks in the water. The event organizers had already paid for the OB truck, the crew’s wages and their accommodation and flights. It was a major loss.
Cutting the Cable
That’s when we decided to leverage Dejero Smart Blending Technology and implement an all-remote, cable-free production workflow.
We now deploy Dejero EnGo mobile video transmitters for our live camera feeds. Each EnGo is equipped with six SIM cards that aggregate signals from multiple carriers. These powerful units blend any IP network (3G/4G/5G, Wi-Fi, LEO/MEO/GEO satellite and broadband) and seamlessly incorporate Starlink when needed in remote locations.
The benefits of the solution have transformed our production by eliminating expensive OB truck rental and transportation and enabling remote production with our home-based control room. Our remote workflow centers around a central control room where a Dejero WayPoint receives the EnGo feeds.
Producers, directors and graphics operators do not need to come on-site. They do switching, replays and add graphics remotely, then we send everything down to master control via the Dejero feed. Commentary teams use a multiviewer to monitor all feeds in real time and we utilize EnGo’s IFB voice communication for director-to-camera operator communication.
The Dejero equipment has not only streamlined our operations but also enhanced our production quality; we’ve achieved increased mobility, sub-second glass-to-glass latency and superior picture quality. Client feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with viewers noting a marked improvement in quality, which has attracted more event sponsors.
We’ve just wrapped our second season using this Dejero-centric workflow and the results speak for themselves: lower costs, reduced stress and higher-quality broadcasts. Our next innovations include jet ski cameras and additional drone feeds—continuing to push boundaries in live sports broadcasting from challenging environments.
For more information, click here.
