Lucas Oil Racing TV selects Forscene for OTT motor racing content
Sports broadcaster Lucas Oil Racing TV has chosen Forscene to provide fast turnaround edits for its OTT motor racing content. The motorsport specialist is using Forscene’s professional video editing software to produce race highlights packages, which are then distributed directly to a global audience through its website and on platforms including Amazon Fire TV, Roku and Nexus Android TV.
Lucas Oil has been a ubiquitous presence in the motor racing broadcast sector for decades. What started as simple corporate sponsorship in 1990 quickly developed into producing racing television programmes with outside production companies, and then launching its own studios to provide content for networks including ESPN, Speed, CBS Sports, and NBC Sports. In 2011 Lucas Oil purchased MAVTV and has since grown the channel to become the television leader in motorsports. At the beginning of this year the company responded to the shift to OTT viewing by launching Lucas Oil Racing TV, a direct-to-consumer platform for motor racing content.
Lucas Oil Racing TV covers up to five motorsport events each weekend from April to October. While some races are broadcast live, contests like tractor pulling and drag boat races have a lot of delays at the event level and don’t suit live coverage. But there is still a need to get these race highlights packages to fans quickly. Trusted Lucas Oil Studio technology partners and Forscene resellers, Technicalogy, first introduced the company to Forscene and the deal was concluded shortly after the team visited the Forscene stand at the 2016 NAB Show.
Forscene’s cloud-based video editing solution provides Lucas Oil Studios with a one-stop solution for editing and distributing near-live sports content. Live video streams are transcoded and uploaded into the Forscene cloud at the sports event, making the content available to the Lucas Oil team anywhere in the world, over a standard internet connection. Editors can start cutting sequences while the live streams are ingesting, 3-5 seconds behind live, and then publish high resolution masters directly from Forscene to multiple destinations at once.
“Forscene allows us to do more with less. We can turn around a high-end, professional product in record time, without having to send teams to the events because our content is just a click away,” said Dave Wonser, multimedia director at Lucas Oil Studios. “We’ve seen significant growth and support for the platform in the sports sector and we’re confident that the technology will continue to be an industry leader in the years to come.”
“Lucas Oil is synonymous with motorsport broadcasting in the same way that we hope Forscene will soon be synonymous with the post-production of digital content,” said Jason Cowan, director of business development at Forbidden. “Signing an established and influential broadcaster like Lucas Oil Studios brings us one step closer to that goal.”