Leader in Mobile Production for Live Sports Streaming Builds Future on Chyron LIVE

Background

Sportsground is an onsite mobile production services company founded in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2011. The company has been a major force behind in the expansion of sports streaming channels across Sweden’s growing sports market, having executed over 15,000 live productions since its inception. Sportsground’s success lies in providing professional-grade production value with multi-cam coverage, real-time motion graphics, replay, telestration, commentary, player tracking, virtual advertising, and post-match highlight packages while maintaining remarkably low service costs through a straightforward remote production workflow.

Challenge

Sportsground is a four-person operation that relies on more than 60 freelancers across Sweden, from camera operators to commentators. At the core of the company’s offerings is an ultralight two-person production with a single camera on-site and a single operator back in the media hub in Stockholm controlling graphics and replay while doing live game commentary.

The centrally located Sportsground media hub facility powers the majority of the company’s projects and has done an exceptional job for the business over the years. But with a growing clientele and back-to-back production schedules, the Sportsground team started to hit the threshold of what the facility could handle, essentially maxing out the physical limits of its rack room and control room real estate. The team began to look for ways to increase the number of projects it could address, without the significant investment costs of a new facility and new equipment. They needed to increase production capacity, simplify production control, and upgrade remote flexibility — particularly for the company’s extensive pool of freelancers.

Solution

Sportsground turned to the Chyron LIVE cloud-native all-in-one production platform to get access to the many Chyron tools and capabilities that are already an essential part of its remote production workflow without the physical constraints of conventional hardware-based systems.

Chyron LIVE combines the best of Chyron’s sports broadcasting tools into a single HTML5 interface, making them available on-demand and billed by active production hour. As a result, Sportsground enjoys flexible access to the Chyron PRIME platform and its broadcast-grade software modules for production switching, real-time motion graphics, clip playout, and audio mixing, all on a single cloud platform.

Another advantage for Sportsground is that LIVE brings its team the very same replay and 3D telestration functionality offered by Chyron’s PAINT sports analysis tool, already a central element of production, but without the same real estate requirements in the Stockholm facility. This model gives Sportsground complete flexibility for remote production, as a remote freelancer can create replays and illustrate clips while someone at the Sportsground facility switches cameras and brings in graphics, with both parties being able to see what the other is doing in real time.

Chyron LIVE handles streaming protocols natively, rather than multiple hardware systems that require users to encode, decode, and re-encode a signal for output, reducing the weight of Sportsground’s overall workflow and providing significantly enhanced flexibility while still ensuring the company can maintain content quality.

Result

With Chyron LIVE, Sportsground has been able to increase its production capacity, upgrade remote flexibility, and simplify its overall production control. The company has done all this while maintaining the professional production quality for which it has become known — and without investing in an all-new facility or equipment upgrade. The on-demand pricing model allows Sportsground to scale its usage and align its investment to match demand for its services.

The operator experience has become more streamlined, as all functions are handled on a single platform and a single interface, and improved flexibility has led to quality-of-life improvements for freelancers and operators that make both the Sportsground team and its clients happy.

“Cloud technology is the path forward as businesses like Sportsground pursue growth, and implementing Chyron LIVE can be a significant milestone in that regard,” said Mathieu Yerle, Chyron senior vice president of strategy. “With a cloud-based live production platform in place, they have the freedom to scale operations on a much greater scale. Chyron LIVE opens the door to tremendous growth potential.”

You can access a recorded presentation of the Sportsground Case Study here for a high-level overview from our Director of Product Marketing, Dan MacDonald.