LAUSANNE, Switzerland—For years, World Archery—the international governing body for the sport of archery—relied on a complex, third-party broadcast setup to deliver coverage of its 10 top-tier and 40 second-tier events each season. This semiremote workflow involved signal uplinks from competition venues, downlinks and fiber handoffs across multiple countries, and an outsourced master control room (MCR) in Scotland.
Not only was the process expensive and time-consuming to reconfigure for every event, it also often left us with little control over quality, particularly when our content wasn’t necessarily given priority over more regular or higher-quantity projects in the shared facilities.
This year, that all changed. We’ve taken production and distribution fully in-house, centralizing our entire live workflow at our Lausanne, Switzerland-based Excellence Centre and powering it with Appear’s award-winning X Platform.
The move has transformed the way we operate, improving reliability, enhancing quality and cutting costs, with an expected payback period of just 18 months.
From Satellite to IP
Our previous satellite-centric model was cumbersome. At each venue, we uplinked to satellite via SNG truck for downlink in London, sent the feed via fiber to Scotland for MCR switching, then back to London for final uplink or fiber distribution. We had no dedicated infrastructure and no consistent configuration—archiving was fragmented and scaling the operation down to lower-tier events was prohibitively costly, stunting our ability to grow.
Today, thanks to Appear’s X20 chassis equipped with Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) modules, decoders and multinetwork management, we send high-quality SRT feeds straight from the venue to Lausanne over IP. The Excellence Centre receives, decodes and redistributes them via IP to more than 20 global media partners, from regional broadcasters to streaming platforms.
Redundancy is built in, with parallel IP paths ensuring our distribution hub can maintain service even in the event of an outage. We’ve also largely eliminated the need for RTMP encoders, thanks to SRT’s efficiency and resilience.
Previously, a typical top-tier event required a 10-person off-site crew spread across multiple locations. Now we run the entire content distribution operation from Lausanne, with just two people, one technical and one editorial. That’s not just a cost saving; it’s a huge simplification of logistics. If we need to add resources, we can—the fully-IP nature of the workflow means that scaling is instantaneous, economic and easy.
Most importantly, we now have full ownership of our signal path. Our output is consistent from event to event and we can make real-time adjustments without depending on a third party’s priorities or availability. And as there’s no cost barrier to adding transmissions, we can scale our offering exponentially. We expect to hit 200 events annually by the end of this cycle—a fourfold increase.
Using Appear’s high-capacity IP platform, we can guarantee predictable quality across all events. Our content now reaches a broader audience, with feeds delivered to more partners more reliably, and often at higher quality than before.
Gateway to Expansion
The flexibility of the X Platform also opens the door for future expansion. We’re already exploring adding transcoding and encoding modules to improve contribution quality from our second-tier events and installing Appear X5 units at select venues worldwide to enhance our remote production capabilities. In the offseason, the Excellence Centre may even be used by other federations, creating a new revenue stream.
Appear’s X Platform stood out for its combination of flexibility, density, and sustainability. For a federation like ours, with events in challenging locations and a lean technical team, efficiency is crucial. The system’s modular design means we can add capabilities as our needs evolve, without replacing core infrastructure.
By removing the complexity of our previous broadcast setup, we now deliver consistent, high-quality coverage with minimal setup time. Appear’s X Platform has allowed us to regain full control of our content, ensure that audiences worldwide enjoy a seamless viewing experience, and reduce operational costs, all with a payback period of just 18 months.
More information is available at www.appear.net.
