Broadcasting of the future! As the European League of Football and its cloud production partner agency novel.media shifted broadcasting towards remote production in 2023, this represented a major step in the league's forward-looking alignment. 68 of 99 games were produced remotely, with up to four games at the same time. Now, the league and its cloud production were awarded by the Sports Video Group Europe (SVG) as one of four ground-breaking projects at the inaugural Sports Broadcasting Achievements (SBAs).

Aimed to increase virtual advertising opportunities, while also reducing production costs and the carbon footprint, the ELF and novel.media implemented a cloud setup in collaboration with Vizrt and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Innovative broadcasting

"We are pleased to see that the cooperation with AWS and Vizrt, which has enabled us to be the first international league world-wide to develop such an innovative concept, is bearing fruit. A good first step, while we continue to expand this partnership into the future," says ELF CEO Zeljko Karajica, who will be present at the AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas end of November to present the remote case in front of an international audience.

“We are honored to receive this SVG award and are glad we mastered to produce that many games remotely. It will hopefully inspire other leagues to take this path and produce live content more efficiently and sustainably," says Levon Melikian MD of novel.media.

Huge step in cloud production

Jon Raidel, Global Lead for Cloud Live Production at Vizrt says: "By switching from traditional OB van productions, the ELF produced their games very cost-efficiently and saved 300 tons of CO2 emissions across the 2023 season. And thanks to Viz Now automatically deploying all the live production tools to AWS for each game, the project was ready to go live in just a few weeks. This project is a testament to the speed, flexibility, quality, and cost benefits cloud live productions offer sports content creators."