Different strokes: Rowing finds its rhythm with direct-to-consumer content

World Rowing Indoor Championships, Paris, France

Formed in 1892, the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés d’Aviron – or World Rowing, as it is now more conveniently known – has been pummelling the waves for more than 130 years. While well established, rowing has historically not been the most inclusive of sports; not everyone has access to water. However, everyone has access to a floor, and the introduction of indoor rowing as a new discipline in 1982 levelled the playing field.

Christian Osterode, World Rowing

“Indoor rowing is low impact and it’s very efficient; 15 minutes a day delivers what you need to stay healthy,” says Christian Osterode, head of broadcast and marketing for World Rowing. “Also, there is a global trend of urbanisation with lots of big cities and not a lot of space to do sports, but you don’t need a lot of space to participate in indoor rowing. On a grassroots level, everybody can take part.”

As a competitive event, the World Rowing Indoor Championships became an annual competition in 2018, but it was the advent of Covid that pushed it into the mainstream when the IOC’s Olympic Virtual Series featured the competition in May 2021.

It has been held as an in-person, virtual, or hybrid competition every year since and is live streamed direct-to-consumer (DTC) across the world. Enabling participants to compete without the inconvenience of having to get wet or travel anywhere to take part, this year’s virtual competition attracted remote participants from 88 countries, with individual athletes taking part from their living rooms and kitchens, gardens, balconies, nightclubs and gymnasiums.

Grassroots growth

The sport’s surge in popularity encouraged World Rowing to implement format changes to maximise inclusivity and this year’s event was held over two concurrent weekends as a knockout competition that anyone could qualify for.

“Covid helped the organisation to further cultivate the idea of adapting a DTC participation strategy and to really give grassroots competitors across each category and age group the opportunity to compete without having to travel around the world,” says Osterode. “Our standard format was always the one-off 500m sprint, the classic 2km distance, and the relay events, but this year we developed it further into knock-out rounds and races over two weekends to give participants the opportunity to compete in all of these categories rather than have to make a choice to compete in one event.”

Connecting the dots

World Rowing’s broadcast workflow is a classic remote production model, with a remote broadcast centre in Munich ingesting all the video and audio feeds. Meanwhile, any potential latency experienced by each participants’ connectivity is negated by the adoption of the data centre of World Rowing service provider TimeTeam in the Netherlands that takes race information directly from the individual rowing machine and uses it to create real-time graphics that accurately track race positions.

“The workflow sounds more difficult than it is,” says Florian Sschnellinger, CCO of Germany’s quattro Media, which has been World Rowing’s broadcast partner for more than a decade.

“World Rowing works directly with TimeTeam who connect all the ergometers from every participant into each race class. The ergometers upload data to the internet and are connected to a racing system in the data centre, which gives us real-time performance data and coverage of each competitor’s place in the event.

2023 World Rowing Indoor Championships, Mississauga, Toronto, Canada

“From a broadcast production point of view, every participant receives a dedicated link via email which connects any streaming device – whether it is a mobile phone, computer, laptop, camera or external webcam – to the cloud which streams video and audio feeds into quattro Media’s remote production hub in Munich; a classic remote live production studio workflow.”

Very graphic coverage

The distributed nature of connected rowing competitions means that live feeds are independently collated, and so mixing the positional graphics into the live stream is essential to not only identify who is winning, but also to deliver the drama to viewers.

“Indoor rowing is heavy on graphics because everyone needs to know who is winning, so our data partners in the Netherlands provide us with a variety of graphic solutions,” confirms Schnellinger. “We apply different templates with split screens of specific competitors, and a real-time graphic of the leading rowers on the side.”

For full hybrid coverage, independent rowers are complemented by bigger, in-person events with hundreds of rowers in one hall which is produced by a directing unit of up to six cameras as an independent TV production. This too is sent to the remote production hub in Munich and is combined with the independent competitor feeds from all around the globe.

It’s a lot to manage, and every race is organised on a rolling basis.

“For this year’s event we were running a different race every couple of minutes,” says Osterode. “Fifty new feeds at a time were coming into the waiting room at the production hub in preparation for the next race throughout the entire day. It’s a very demanding broadcast production, because it’s an ongoing rolling process; once you press the button to switch on the machine, you can’t stop it.”

Schnellinger agrees: “Between the 500m, 2km and relays we are sometimes running up to 40 races per day, as well as pre roll content pre- and post-race, and additional slowmos and interviews. While 2k races take up to eight minutes, the 500m races last just one and a half minutes, so for those we even have to run an alternating system with the data company switching between those two race systems.”

Commentator positions

The enterprise is true distributed production in every sense. Not only are the competitors, graphic production, and broadcast control facilities all in different places, the competition uses commentators, influencers and expert guests from all over the world and World Rowing’s umpires are also remotely located. Meanwhile, World Rowing is also managing the competition side of things out of its main headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland. It means comms are also very demanding.

“The three different hubs, commentators, umpires, and all the guests all need to coordinate the action with each other,” says Osterode. “We have different levels of communication within each hub, and two of these hubs are always communicating directly with each other. There is always a lot going on in your headphones!”

Developing coverage and delivering value

Buoyed by this momentum, World Rowing is busy working on a number of Esports initiatives. Earlier this month, it co-hosted the Virtual Sports Forum 2025 in Tokyo with the Japan Sport Council. It is also launching a Virtual Series in June with the goal of encouraging even more community participation in connected rowing; it has been invited by the Esports World Cup Foundation to be part of the 2025 Esports World Cup in Saudi Arabia this summer; and it is pushing for the sport to be an event for the Olympic Esports Games following its submission to the IOC to be part of the inaugural edition scheduled to take place in 2027.

It’s adoption of more immersive broadcast techniques is truly making waves.

“We can document the competition purely with graphics to give participants and competitors their time and score; we don’t need any broadcast production for this, and previously our coverage was very much focused on this documentation,” says Osterode.

“We had no time in between races for things like interviews that explain what’s going on, or to deliver a more coherent viewing experience. One of the reasons for reviewing the format to run over two weekends was to have shorter blocks of racing to allow for more comfortable and balanced broadcast operations, thereby delivering a better broadcast proposition. This year, for example, we introduced a competitor map, where we could locate where all the people in the race actually are. We are still going through this process and it’s very exciting because we have the flexibility to try new things.

“Our next objective is to tailor a competition format that resonates in the Esports environment, and we are working with game publishers, sports committees and commissions to develop the necessary qualification path, but also the necessary digital environment to be competitive in that context.”