Warner Bros. Discovery Sports implements further live cloud-based production using AWS

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Sports Europe, a group of television networks including TNT Sports and Eurosport, broadcasts a wide range of sports coverage across the continent, including some of the world’s most watched events. Starting several years ago, WBD Sports decided to take bold steps to migrate its legacy media workflows to the cloud, which has resulted in greater operational flexibility, sustainability, and automation at scale.

Ian Cockett, GVP Engineering & Technology at Warner Bros. Discovery, explained, “Back in 2018, we were facing having to re-implement our whole technology stack all across Europe, in many different markets. We had ten sizable facilities across Europe containing a lot of legacy broadcast equipment that was all end-of-life. Looking toward the future, we started a project to consolidate all of those resources and move to completely remote production so we could actually separate the control surfaces from the backend technology.”

Beginning with a hybrid setup built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), WBD Sports quickly saw the benefits of using the cloud—for instance, better allocation of resources. The broadcasting company holds a wide range of sporting rights, with varying levels of production resource, staff, and infrastructure needs. The flexibility of cloud-based remote production allowed the broadcaster to deploy multiple productions remotely, tapping into the same facilities and working simultaneously, without having to scale up on-premises equipment. With this new way of working, WBD Sports was well-positioned to weather the disruptions of the global pandemic in 2020—during which the company further accelerated its cloud adoption, ultimately working toward fully cloud-based live production.

“The pandemic showed us that we can put all of our sports rights on the same cloud production platform,” said Cockett. “This actually gives our teams the ability to work with software-based tools and get the same production experience for every event that they work on. It’s more streamlined; they’re not having to move between a legacy control room and a cloud platform.”

Now, fully embracing the cloud, WBD Sports has found that it’s able to work more sustainably. Traditionally for a live sports broadcast, the network would need to send 20 or more people to the event, along with outside broadcast (OB) and satellite trucks, and all of the power they require—in addition to the team of people working back at the base facility.

“The carbon footprint of traditional sports production is huge. So, what we’re able to do with the cloud is go to a much lighter weight on-site presence,” explained Cockett. “We still need camera operators, but we can use 4G and 5G wireless RF technology or cabled internet to bring those feeds directly into the cloud. So, all of the things that would be done in the OB truck are now effectively being done in the cloud and handed off to us.”

In addition to lowering the carbon footprint of a production, this approach also lowers the budget requirements, which is particularly cost effective for more niche sporting events with smaller audiences. The ability to have crew work remotely also broadens the potential talent pool, allowing WBD Sports to use the best team for the job independent of location.

Another benefit to cloud production that WBD has uncovered is the ability to leverage new tools to help automate certain complex tasks. WBD Sports incorporates live commentary in dozens of languages, which is a massive challenge logistically and creatively. By using AWS, WBD Sports now has a remote solution enabling contribution of commentary feeds from anywhere in Europe. A typical broadcast week averages between 600 and 700 remote commentary sessions, but for a major international sporting event recently held in Japan, WBD Sports was able to scale up to 14,000, which it wouldn’t be able to accommodate without a remote platform. Cockett explained, “It’s now an essential part of our operation. And co-commentators can even be in separate locations now.”

Building on this success, WBD Sports worked with AWS to build an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that automatically monitors remote commentary feeds coming in and ensures that the right language is going to the right channel. “This toolset helps us monitor what is really a large-scale problem, which is that we can’t have someone manually monitoring 20 languages on that number of feeds. We might have 400 simultaneous ingest ports going. The sheer scale of it means that you have to automate. You have to be able to look at the problem in a different way and leverage new tools to be able to solve that problem,” said Cockett.

With preparations for an upcoming major international sporting event in France now well underway, WBD Sports is exploring how cloud technology can enable new ways of bringing viewers closer to the action. “This competition is going to have 32 sports and over 300 different events, and every minute of every event is covered on our online platform—so it’s a massive amount of content. But with cloud workflows, it’s not as daunting.”

To hear more from Cockett, watch his full discussion at IBC 2023. And browse the AWS for M&E at IBC Demo and Innovation Center for more use cases and demonstrations spanning broadcast, content production, data science and analytics, direct-to-consumer (D2C) and streaming, media supply chain, and monetization.