Overcoming Extreme Conditions to Livestream the CX80 World Cup and European Mountain Bike Orienteering Championships

As digital platforms redefine how audiences engage with sports, niche events have a unique opportunity to capture global attention. Often these events take place in remote locations, introducing logistical challenges to get equipment, crews, and personnel onsite. Despite these obstacles, innovative technology solutions have paved the way for cost-effective remote broadcasting, transforming the seemingly impossible task of remote broadcasting on a tight budget into a reality.

Take the example of the CX80 World Cup and European Mountain Bike Orienteering Championships (EMTBOC), a major competition with 109 competitors from 20 European countries. This unique event is celebrated by a passionate and knowledgeable audience. Producing a live broadcast from a remote forest might sound like a near-impossible feat without a full traditional Outside Broadcast (OB) setup, but that’s exactly what the team accomplished. Set deep within a forest in Poland, the event took place far from conventional broadcast infrastructure, with no power grid, limited connectivity, and minimal on-site support. With a combination of innovative tech solutions and strategic planning, the production team overcame these challenges to create a seamless live-streamed experience, connecting sport fans across Europe and beyond.

Here’s how they tackled each challenge head-on.

Challenge accepted: A remote, untapped location

With no grid electricity supply, zero access to fiber or broadband internet, and limited mobile network coverage, the EMTBOC production site was a very different environment to a stadium based setting where sports broadcasts typically thrive, and traditional OB facilities were outside the production budget. This meant the team needed to adopt alternative strategies to power their equipment, ensure connectivity, and coordinate production efforts across both on-site and remote locations.

“Producing this event required stepping far outside the box and approaching everything differently,” said Per Frost from Permafrost AB, production lead. “Traditional broadcast methods weren’t going to work here.”

A distributed team: Remote production takes center stage

For the EMTBOC TV production team, the approach to solving the location’s limitations was to adopt a distributed remote production model. Team members worked collaboratively across Europe rather than concentrating everyone on-site. Only a small, agile team went onsite to manage the scaled back on-the-ground operations. The smaller physical footprint helped reduce costs and environmental impact.

By using cloud-based solutions and low-bandwidth applications, the team coordinated camera feeds, graphics, and other broadcast elements without overwhelming the event site’s limited connectivity. This included four cameras in the finish arena, two cameras in the forest, a real-time GPS tracking system, video playout, and graphics overlay.

Delivering high-quality video from a location with unpredictable connectivity is a significant challenge. To address this, the team used Ateliere’s specialized video transport solutions designed to be bandwidth-efficient and robust. This allowed the team to send high-quality video streams over limited network capacity, ensuring minimal lag and image degradation while maintaining a reliable connection.

Compared with traditional software production solutions, Ateliere Live’s advanced video transport tools and support for time-addressable media allow production to be reliably conducted remotely from the camera sources. The lightweight design enabled the team to add multiple cameras to the setup without significantly increasing data requirements, capturing the action from multiple angles and creating a dynamic viewing experience.

An unexpected advantage of adopting a cloud-based approach is how much easier it was for the team to share content with external media outlets. Unlike relying on an OB van with a weak internet connection, the cloud enables local TV stations to access content straightforwardly. This efficiency not only streamlines distribution but also enhances value for local sponsors.

The result was an immersive broadcast - almost 12 hours streamed over four races - that transported viewers to the heart of the event, despite the remote setting and limited connectivity. “Ateliere Live allowed us to deliver a quality production with less data and power requirements. This efficiency made all the difference given our bandwidth and power generation constraints,” Per noted.

Innovative connectivity: Starlink as the lifeline

A major hurdle for the production lead was overcoming the complete lack of conventional internet options in the forested area. With no fiber connections and only minimal 4G mobile network coverage, the team had to find a way to create a stable, reliable internet connection for streaming. They turned to satellite internet provider Starlink, which enabled stable high-speed internet access even in remote regions. Starlink became the lifeline for the production, providing connectivity that allowed for real-time streaming and remote monitoring.

“We had to get creative with how we used our resources,” Per explained. “Starlink enabled us to push through some of the connectivity issues we faced, which was crucial in an area without the usual support systems we’d rely on for an event of this size.”

The team further bolstered the connection with supplementary 4G networks from Intinor, a high quality video over IP solutions provider, to increase redundancy and add stability.

Per adds, “In addition to leveraging Starlink, all our video feeds went through Intinor routers with their transport protocol. This hybrid approach was crucial, allowing production to continue with minimal interruptions despite the challenges presented by the natural environment.”

Integrating graphics and timing data for real-time updates

For an event like the EMTBOC, timing data and live graphics are essential to delivering a professional, informative broadcast. With limited on-site resources, the production team used Ateliere Live to integrate elements through Peter Löfås of Lofas AB, a remote graphics operator who worked from home in Sweden. By integrating event GPS data with HTML-based graphics outputs, the team provided real-time graphics such as lower thirds with athletes’ names and country flags, start lists, and results lists, at any point of the race without requiring a high-bandwidth connection, adding an informative layer to the live stream.

Ateliere Live's media synchronization across the internet enables a proxy editing workflow, separating low-delay editing versions from higher-quality distribution versions. This allows production staff to work anywhere with a reasonable internet connection, enabling distributed production from virtually any location.

Managing timing data posed challenges due to connectivity limitations, but it was successfully integrated to deliver real-time competition results. Although occasional delays occurred, the implementation of cloud-based graphics systems ensured that critical information was promptly available to viewers. The core advantage of this approach lies in the immediate upload of timing data to the cloud, enabling the system to generate a public HTML page accessible online with low latency.

Cloud production: Ensuring continuity despite on-site failures

Power reliability was another key concern. Relying solely on generator power created risks in terms of continuity. During the production, the team took advantage of AWS cloud production, ensuring the broadcast could continue even when local infrastructure encountered issues. AWS’s cloud-based instances allowed the team to maintain program continuity by running the entire production in the cloud, reducing the risk of disruption from on-site generator failures.

Using AWS instances running Ateliere Live also offered energy efficiency benefits, as the Ateliere Live GPU approach minimized the event’s overall environmental footprint. By offloading processing to the cloud on efficiently designed software, the team ensured a stable production environment that could continue even if local power sources faltered.

Looking ahead, Per sees exciting potential for future collaborations, particularly as remote production technologies continue to evolve. The success of this remote event demonstrates how today’s technologies can unlock new possibilities, even in the most challenging environments.

Transforming the “impossible” into reality

The CX80 World Cup and European Mountain Bike Orienteering Championships showcase what’s possible with the right combination of technology and innovation. With a thoughtful approach to connectivity, power, and production coordination, the team successfully delivered a live broadcast from a challenging, remote location, connecting fans to a niche sport they love.

From Starlink-enabled internet access to AWS cloud production environments, Ateliere Live with advanced GPU technology and remote production workflow used in this production are paving the way for more events to reach audiences globally, no matter how remote the setting.

To investigate how similar strategies might elevate your own content offerings, learn more about Ateliere Live.

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