Breaking Down the Barriers to Esports Live Production and Streaming
By Jim Bask
From NewTek blog
The action in esports takes place on a computer or game console display, sometimes many displays. Putting a live camera on an esports contestant doesn’t translate the same as it does with athletic sports. Traditional video production equipment does not adapt readily or cheaply to ingesting video game content, often requiring expensive hardware signal convertors and cabling. Sometimes it requires an additional system for each game computer involved.
Yahoo Esports recently took a look at how NewTek is addressing both ends of that process, with software that enables gaming systems to send their screens across the network, and production systems that ingest IP in addition to the traditional dedicated video signal cable types (also called “baseband”), such as SDI. They explore how esports media titan Twitch TV is using those solutions to scale up operations and audience while containing costs.
The key technology is NewTek’s NDI, an IP solution for video transport. “NDI lets us send signals between hardware without things like capture cards and cables,” Josh Shaw, producer and technical director at Twitch, explained.