BINGAM AM RHEIN, Germany— Remote production specialists DMC Broadcast Solutions has taken delivery of two software-defined outside broadcast (OB) trucks from Broadcast Solutions.
The entire signal processing and delivery workflow of the trucks is powered by Grass Valley AMPP software.
“We have been at the forefront of remote production, seizing the operational, environmental and commercial benefits of keeping our talented staff and technicians at our production bases rather than travel to site,” said Jens Envall, chief innovation officer at DMC Production. “But we also recognize the fundamental challenge with the conventional view of remote production: bringing all the signals back to a control room calls for a lot of bandwidth, for very high levels of stability on that bandwidth and for very tight controls of latency.
“So, we came up with a concept we call ‘reverse remote production’ where all the switching and processing happens on site, in an outside broadcast truck, but the control of that equipment happens in the central production suite,” said Envall. “When we spoke to the team at Broadcast Solutions, they got the idea immediately, and together we moved rapidly from sketches to two trucks on the road, covering premium events like 3.Liga soccer in Germany and ATP tennis in Sweden.”
The compact trucks offer operational space if there is any need for on-site production control. There is also a data center running the AMPP processing and GRID network. Alongside these capabilities, there is room in the fixed-axle truck to carry all cameras, lenses, grips and other equipment to sites.
This means that what once required two articulated trailers for a conventional outside broadcast—an OB truck and a tender truck—can now be replaced with a single fixed axle truck, slashing the carbon footprint of the operation, BI said. At the same time, the whole reverse remote production system requires only 100 Mbps of internet connectivity, a tiny fraction of what’s needed for conventional remote production.
Each truck supports up to 16 cameras, with Grass Valley LDX98 cameras supplied by Broadcast Solutions as part of this contract. They connect via a traditional tailboard and stage boxes. Currently, the trucks support 1080p native signals in SDR and HDR and are 4k Ultra HD-ready.
Internally redundant Cisco Systems routers manage the signals with the majority of processing carried out by the pair of Grass Valley AMPP servers with NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and 11 TB of local storage per server, providing full replay and super slo-mo capability. Audio is mixed with a Calrec Argo M36 console.
External connectivity uses around 25 Mb/s for low-latency control and data between the site and the production center, and another 25 Mbps for monitoring using WebRTC multiviewer streams. Program outputs are delivered from the truck, typically by a 25 Mbps SRT stream, leaving comfortable headroom in a typical 100 Mb/s public internet connection.
“This has been a great project, driven by close collaboration with DMC,” said Zlatan Gavran, chief operating officer at Broadcast Solutions. “They came to us with their outline concept for reverse remote production, and together we spent a long time working out how to realize the ideas using AMPP software.
“The result is something that has never been done before,” Gavran said. “A true software-defined outside broadcast unit, delivering the highest quality output while controlled from anywhere in the world. It uses cutting-edge technology like the GRID (MXL) network and software tools, but presents them in familiar form so that EICs, technicians, experienced operators and directors feel immediately at home.
One of the new OB trucks will be on display at IBC 2026 in the outside exhibit area, stand 0.A03.
More information is available on the Broadcast Solutions website.
