SVG Europe was onsite in Jeddah for the new E1 Series and caught up with Timeline Television after the race for a rundown on how the fully remote production model underpins the electric powerboat championship’s global, sustainability-driven broadcast operation.

“Remote production doesn’t work for everything, but this event wouldn’t work without it. Given the venues we travel to, remote gives continuity and avoids the need to build a new gallery at every location,” explains Emily Merron, technical producer at E1 production company Aurora Media.

E1 is now in its third season, and from the outset the electric powerboat championship was conceived as a remote production.

As a water-based sport with a race calendar that taking in weekend races in Saudi Arabia, Italy, Croatia, Monaco, Nigeria, US and the Bahamas, transient venues and a lack of permanent infrastructure are par for the course.

“The entire broadcast infrastructure is condensed into three racks, keeping the overall onsite footprint as streamlined as possible…combined with the majority of equipment being shipped by sea freight, this keeps shipping costs and environmental impact low.”

And, as a purpose driven sport with a big focus on ecology and preservation of the oceans, a remote operation helps reduce the number of people needed on site, aiding E1’s sustainability credentials as well as making for a more cost-effective production operation.

E1 Series chief content and product officer Laurence Boyd: “There’s a minimum number of people you need to manage and control a production and be sustainable, and I’d say we’re at that number. It’s a tight ship. Using remote broadcast production makes a big difference, reducing the number of people on site by around 45 per cent for each event compared to previously which saves on flights and carbon emissions.

“It’s a technical feat, but what I’m proudest of is how quietly, confidently and collaboratively everyone works together. Along with Aurora, we have different partners – Timeline Television, Cross Shore Media (stabilised cameras), BadAss XR Studio (AR) and Al Kamel (GFX and data) – and bringing those partners together is what allows us to do what we do.”

Timeline Television provides the remote production services for E1’s host broadcast, providing technical crew and a core engineering team at both sites, including technical managers, vision, sound, RF and onboard camera engineers, along with equipment and facilities onsite and back at the facilities company’s Ealing Broadcast Centre (EBC) in west London – which is where programmes are made and where the director, producer and commentators are based and where replays are managed.

In the broadcast compound in Jeddah is a Timeline crew of 12, including a unit manager and engineers. On-site, Timeline provides manages and supports the technical facilities required for the host broadcast production, as well as the distribution of the E1-provisioned dual 1 GbE Internet services to other technical suppliers onsite.

Back at the EBC, Timeline provides the production control rooms and edits for the remote production of the host feed, as well as managing the worldwide distribution to E1’s takers through its MCR. 

The connectivity between the race locations and the EBC is all over public internet, as Timeline Television technical operations manager Charles Howells explains: “This allows greater flexibility and lower costs than a Layer 2 alternative; however, it does mean higher latency. Due to this, it is primarily data services that require the lowest latency that remain onsite, such as remote camera control racks data. The RF, video and audio feeds and talkback are sent to and from Ealing.”

While connectivity is a critical component of remote production, the remote and heritage locations visited by E1 do not always offer sufficient network capacity. At Lago Maggiore in Italy last year, the lack of fibre connectivity required a change in approach.

Read more: Live from E1 Series: Inside the remote production operation

As Merron explains: “We treated the Lago Maggiore production as if it were on-site, running BNCs into the truck, which was set up with a full gallery. This meant we didn’t have to dismantle and reconfigure everything when we returned to remote production.”

Underpinning this flexible approach is a transport and control architecture designed to adapt quickly to varying connectivity conditions. For the remote operation, all signals are sent between sites as ASI over IP with 2022-7 protection using Domo encoders/decoders and Appear TV.

“This allows us to keep latency as low as possible, with the added benefit that RF signals only need to be decoded once back at EBC,” explains Howells.  

A Ross Ultrix is used to manage signals onsite and an RTS Odin handles talkback. For sound, a Calrec RP1 provides remote ears mixing and signal control from the Calrec desk back at the EBC. 

“The entire broadcast infrastructure is condensed into three racks, with a fourth handling internet distribution, keeping the overall onsite footprint as streamlined as possible,” says Howells.

“Combined with the majority of equipment being shipped by sea freight, this approach helps keep both shipping costs and environmental impact low.”

For Timeline, the challenge isn’t eliminating latency – it’s choosing where it matters the most. “As with any remote production it’s all about the trade-off between quality, latency and reliability, explains Howells.
“After substantial testing, we landed on a fixed bit rate and latency parameters that we think give the optimal balance between the three when working over the internet.

“All the video, audio and RF feeds are sent back as is and synchronised at EBC. We have a lot of experience with remote production and whilst this is always a big topic of conversation at the planning stage, we find that in reality, there is minimal material constraints to the production.”