From peaks to screens: Overcoming extreme conditions to live stream niche sporting events with Ateliere

By Andy Hooper, SVP live products at Ateliere.

As traditional broadcasting gives way to digital platforms, niche sport can now reach global audiences. Often events take place in remote locations, making it challenging to get equipment and crews to cover them. Smaller fanbases can make it difficult to attract advertisers or generate substantial revenue. Thus, it’s harder to justify the cost of coverage. However, innovative technology can transform the seemingly impossible task of remote broadcasting on a tight budget into a reality.

Breaking the mould

The 2024 Paris Olympics saw the addition of several niche sports (remember breakdancing?). In 2025, expect streaming services to begin to tap this market to expand audiences and differentiate themselves. So why are niche sports so appealing?

  • Lower licensing fees: Major league sports incur high licensing fees. Niche sports offer lower rights fees while still attracting viewers.
  • Year-round content: Traditional sports have defined seasons, but many niche sports are year-round or have alternative schedules. Streamers can fill programming gaps, offering consistent content to maintain subscribers.
  • Data-driven content: With access to real-time viewership data, platforms can identify growing interest in sports to expand their coverage.
  • Untapped audiences: Underserved by traditional broadcasters, niche fans are eager for content. Letting fans follow their favourites, regardless of location, increases a platform’s reach.
  • Brand differentiation: Exclusive sports set a service apart from competitors, attracting subscribers seeking specialised offerings. Platforms create spaces for interaction, live chats, and even user-generated content, fostering loyalty with a highly engaged community.

Clearing a path: Outdated technology stacks

The benefits and challenges of niche sports are many. Live production has been slow keeping up with the pace of change driven by the internet. The prevalence of expensive-to-implement, high-end broadcast standards often requires dedicated hardware appliances. Frequently, solutions are integrated into relatively inflexible production stacks with fixed capacities limited by proximity to studios.

Meanwhile, other technology domains benefit from significantly reduced purchase costs and TCO for solutions based on commodity ‘off-the-shelf’ PC hardware, GPUs, and cloud and internet technologies.

Recently, many established vendors have begun shifting their technology to software-based solutions. Yet, these offerings are often constrained by outdated assumptions that have defined static hard-wired integrations. In 2025, expect broadcasters and streaming services to investigate how to overcome these barriers by tapping into the evolving IT industry’s benefits.

Branches and bottlenecks

Many niche sports take place outside a traditional broadcast infrastructure, with no power grid, limited connectivity, and minimal on-site support. A combination of innovative tech solutions and strategic planning can overcome these challenges to create a seamless live-streamed experience, connecting sport fans globally.

The European Mountain Bike Orienteering Championships is a great example of the challenges facing remote sports productions. Taking place in a Polish forest, the event required alternative strategies to power equipment, ensure connectivity, and coordinate production across on-site and remotely. Since conventional broadcasting methods wouldn’t work, this event provides a roadmap of how to approach niche sports coverage.

Remote production will take centre stage

For many, the approach to solving a location’s limitations is to adopt a remote production (REMI) model. Cloud-based solutions and low-bandwidth applications can coordinate camera feeds, graphics, and other broadcast elements without overwhelming the event site’s limited connectivity.

Teams can work in multiple locations rather than concentrating everyone on-site. Only a small agile team is needed to manage scaled back, on-the-ground-operations. The smaller physical footprint helps reduce production costs and environmental impact.

For events such as the Mountain Bike Orienteering Championships, timing data and live graphics are essential. With limited on-site resources, production teams need to integrate elements through a remote graphics operator. Relying on HTML-based graphics outputs lets production teams provide real-time updates without needing high-bandwidth connection, adding an informative layer to sports live streams.

Timing data, while challenging to manage due to connectivity constraints, can be integrated to display real-time competition results. Despite occasional delays, the use of cloud-based graphics systems ensure that essential information reaches viewers promptly.

Streaming where networks are sparse

A major hurdle is the lack of internet options in remote locations. Delivering high-quality video with unpredictable connectivity is a challenge. Without fibre connections and with minimal 4G mobile network coverage, streamers need to create a stable, reliable internet connection. Many turn to satellite internet providers to enable stable high-speed internet access and remote monitoring.

Supplementary 4G networks can bolster connections to increase redundancy and stability. This hybrid approach is crucial to continue with minimal interruptions despite the challenges presented by the natural environment.

Specialised video transport solutions can transmit high-quality video streams over limited network capacity. Bandwidth-efficient and robust, these solutions ensure minimal lag and image degradation while maintaining a reliable connection.

Compared with traditional streaming solutions, advanced video transport tools are critical in conserving bandwidth. This efficiency allows teams to add multiple camera feeds to enhance coverage, creating an engaging and immersive experience for viewers without straining the network.

In some instances, niche sports rely on ‘near live’ coverage that is recorded and edited in close-to-real-time, then broadcast with minimal delay. This approach is often used when true live broadcasting isn’t feasible due to logistical, technical, or content-quality reasons but where the intent is still to give audiences a ‘live-like’ experience.

Transforming the impossible into reality

Power reliability is another concern. Generators can power equipment on-site, but running all elements of a live broadcast solely on generators creates continuity risks. To address this, a cloud-based production environment can enable control even if on-site equipment experiences power issues.

Cloud-based setups can offer further significant energy efficiency by using GPU resources to offload processing and reduce the need for on-site servers. The flexibility to switch seamlessly between local and cloud-based resources ensures that if power falters, broadcasts continue uninterrupted. This setup demonstrates the value of cloud production, especially in settings where infrastructure is unreliable.

Connectivity issues and time delays will occasionally disrupt the viewing experience, suggesting the need for more resilient solutions to accommodate timing data in remote environments. Making technical solutions more accessible to creatives without deep technical expertise will help streamline productions and reduce setup. This will be instrumental in refining REMI workflows in infrastructure-limited locations.

In 2025, a thoughtful approach to connectivity, power, and production coordination will pave the way for niche sports to reach audiences globally, no matter how remote.

 

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