AUSTIN, Texas—FloSports is a U.S.-based sports media company that specializes in live and on-demand streaming of more than 25 underserved sports to hyper-passionate fan bases.
As senior director of live production at FloSports, part of my role is to ensure we deliver a quality product to our viewers, and a big part of that is transmission quality and stable contribution streams. In the early days, internet bandwidth made this challenging and we didn’t have nearly the scale we do now. Last year, we streamed more than 40,000 live sporting events including all of the stick-and-ball sports, along with wrestling, grappling, track and field, motorsports, cheer competitions and tons of collegiate athletics.
Our customers aren’t necessarily interested in all the sports that we stream, however. They’re interested in their sport and a particular game. They expect a good quality on-air product and they don’t necessarily care how it gets there.
On-Site and REMI
With that in mind, reliability in production is something that is critical to our operations. Given the wide variety of events we stream, there is a split between those produced by our partners and those produced by our team. Until recently, most of the events we produced ourselves were handled completely on-site, but in recent years, we started to incorporate REMI production coverage. In both these instances, that is where TVU Networks comes in.
Our relationship with TVU started because we were seeking a backup transmission solution that didn’t need to rely on a standard internet service provider. We needed a way to send high-quality, composited audio and video back when ISPs didn’t work well or when we didn’t have enough bandwidth. To maintain uninterrupted live coverage, we deployed TVU One mobile units as backups where our contribution feed started, ensuring resilience against potential connectivity issues.
After we realized the success of integrating the units and the benefits we were seeing—ultra-low latency, ease of use, reliability and seamless integration with the TVU ecosystem—the partnership grew significantly.
Now, we’re doing REMI productions with TVU, utilizing its IP-video solutions to produce live programming from remote venues, such as a cross-country course or dirt racing track, where traditional broadcasting infrastructure may be lacking. We’ve also started moving more to the cloud, utilizing TVU Producer to produce live events remotely. This offers us plenty of flexibility as we bring everything back in-house to our facility in Austin to put it all together.
More Time at Home
The most obvious benefit we see with TVU is efficiency; we want to save money where we can without compromising the quality of the product we put out. TVU definitely offers flexibility when it comes to REMI workflows, which in turn allows us to bring production in-house, where we can maintain consistent crews who know our gear and workflows. This also has an impact on our team’s quality of life—less travel and less time on the road means more time at home, which is beneficial for everyone involved in our productions.
Today, TVU has become a foundational piece of how we are evolving as a production company. In this business, consistency is everything: consistent streams, consistent quality, consistent crews. The flexibility we’ve gained by using TVU’s IP and cloud-based tools has allowed us to rethink how we cover live sports—not just in terms of cost and logistics, but also in terms of people. We can focus on building long-term teams and workflows that grow with us while still delivering the kind of seamless, high-quality viewing experience that our audiences expect.
As we continue to expand and refine our production capabilities, partners like TVU are instrumental. They don’t just just help keep us up to date with the tech, they also help us lead, which, in turn, keeps our customers happy.
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