Playing IP first: LTN on how growing sporting leagues can master a new production blueprint

Pro Volleyball Federation is partnering for its second year with LTN to enhance its live broadcasts further

By Mike Burk, LTN general manager for event production and transmission unit.

Sports fans today enjoy unrivalled, on-demand access to global, national, regional, and hyper-local events across multiple platforms and devices. Even under one roof, viewers can simultaneously watch multiple sports on several TV’s, laptops, and smartphones, exercising unprecedented control over when, where and how they consume content.

Surging consumer choice and digital demand are powering new waves of investment across every level of sports. Flexible, non-exclusive rights models, and a surge of new viewing platforms are putting more competitions, big and small, on screens worldwide. Emerging organisations benefit, fans stay engaged, and rights buyers gain powerful ways to reach new audiences with unique live events.

Growing moment for smaller leagues

While the biggest sporting events and flagship leagues dominate the headlines, next-tier sports – from college conferences, emerging federations and niche international sports – are turning to flexible, purpose-built IP workflows to produce professional-grade coverage. They’re unifying quality across disparate teams and venues, launching custom streaming feeds, and forging direct audience relationships on platforms once beyond their reach, all without the constraints of satellite.

Professional sport leagues like volleyball, women’s soccer and rugby remain agile with IP-based production and transmission workflows built for scale, speed and reliability. From local arenas and remote beaches to campus venues, centralised IP-based workflows deployed over a purpose-built video transport network enable professional-grade broadcasts with minimal onsite infrastructure and lean teams.

Beyond using all-IP workflows and centralised production models to cost effectively air more live games, sports leagues are now tailoring feeds in real time, spinning up multiple versions with local commentary, tailored graphics, and localised advertising for different platforms or rights buyers.

A feed destined for FAST platforms, for instance, can auto-apply the correct ad pods, automatically customised with the right ad profile, SCTE markers, graphics and announcers, while a Latin American feed can seamlessly insert local-language audio and tailored scorebugs or overlays to ensure authentic market relevance.

Consider the Pro Volleyball Federation (PVF), the leading women’s professional volleyball league in the US. In its second season, PVF embraced an all-IP strategy using LTN’s live video production, real time customisation and intelligent IP distribution services to deliver 45 linear broadcast matches and 70 live digital events to broadcast and digital partners, including CBS, Fox Sports, and Roku.

Fuelling a 350% boost in broadcast reach, the league has championed real time customisation technologies to spin up platform-specific feeds, each tailored in format, audio track, and monetisation setup to meet the requirements of various digital platforms. This type of production blueprint demonstrates how fast-growing organisations can expand across new audiences and deliver optimal quality content with a scalable, fully managed service.

Not all IP transport is equal

Managed IP transmission has become a reliable and flexible alternative to satellite and fibre, but not all IP networks are created equal. Protocol-based transport solutions and generic cloud offerings may promise flexibility, yet they often require stitching together multiple vendors and layers of complexity. That complexity can create reliability risks in high pressure live event environments and drive up costs when scaling up for regional feeds or multiple language feeds.

The underlying IP network architecture is critical. Opensource protocols like SRT play a key role in many IP workflows, but don’t offer the built-in routing, support, and end-to-end visibility of a managed, purpose-built IP network. Hyperscaler clouds offer scale and flexibility, yet their generalised infrastructure can mean unpredictable costs, variable performance, and added latency challenges. The public internet remains an unpredictable, best-effort environment. Sports broadcasters need high performance IP networks that bypass internet complexities, while seamlessly supporting all standard protocols.

IP networks built exclusively for live video integrate signal acquisition, routing, monitoring, ad signalling, metadata insertion and playout into a single fully managed environment, from venue to viewer. This consolidated approach reduces hardware requirements, simplifies live event production and leverages template-driven automation for seamless scalability. Eliminating multiple vendors and fragmented workflows lowers costs, streamlines operations and provides a single point of support throughout the production workflow.

More events, new versions, untapped markets

Reliable, low latency IP transport and seasoned production partners now level the playing field for smaller leagues. Mature all-IP venue-to-viewer workflows, backed by proven IP network infrastructure, empower emerging leagues to spin up more versions of their live events, secure new rights deals and scale globally with predictable costs. The game is just getting started.