Producer-eye view: Getting the lowdown on the League of Legends World Championship Finals 2024
The Dublin Remote Broadcast Centre production room for Riot Games’ League of Legends Championships Final 2024
The League of Legends World Championship Finals 2024 took place last weekend (2 November) in London, marking the biggest-ever esports tournament to be held in the UK. Taking place at the O2 Arena in London, Riot Games’ Sam Kordower Chaimson, senior manager of broadcast production, and executive broadcast producer for the Worlds, was on site to make sure everything went smoothly. SVG Europe caught up with Kordower Chaimson to find out more on the overview for the League of Legends World Championships Finals 2024, which was supported by technical services partner, NEP.
Tell us about your workflow for the League of Legends World Championships Finals.
SKC: We operate on a world feed model. Our priority is to invest in these upstream innovations, improvements and curation, so that broadcast partners all over the world – of which we have 22 this year, not counting co-streamers which brings the number much higher – can make sure all the innovations and all that investment goes towards making sure players around the world have an S-tier experience, regardless of whether or not their production partner locally is robust, more small, more high tech, low tech, what have you, whether you are in a large production facility like our teams working out of Dublin or other parts of the world like Brazil or China or Korea, or even if you’re a smaller broadcaster like those in Serbia, the Czech Republic, and what have you. We operate on this world view model to make sure that all those fans in their own home languages get an experience that we think is worthy of their time and reflects their dedication to our sport.
The way we do that is working with our remote broadcast centre in Dublin, Ireland where the show is switched on site. We’ve got myself, another producer, as well as our director and assistant director [on the ground here in London] and then everything else is back in Dublin including EVS and graphics. We use two real time graphics engines, Vizrt and Barracks, for different use cases, whether we’re pulling data from the game API or not, as well as all the switching and transmission, as well as what happens out of Dublin. And that’s where we go to our broadcast partners around the world alongside us in Dublin, because the remote broadcast facility supports up to six productions at any given time.
League of Legends Championships Final 2024 observers, at Riot Games’ RBC
And how are you distributing that to your broadcasters?
SKC: All of that around the world is distributed over Riot Direct, which is Riot’s proprietary internet service provider (ISP). It was built to provide a better player experience for players of League of Legends initially, based on how your ISP that you pay and subscribe to in your home decides to route your traffic. It could lead to a better or worse in-game experience because it could increase or decrease your latency based on how they decide to route things on the way to our data centres and our servers.
So to mitigate that, Riot developed its own ISP, which we call Riot Direct. And then we realised that game data takes relatively little amounts of bandwidth, so we started transporting audio and video over it as well, and that’s what supports all of our remote broadcasts around the world. We lease last mile fibre from the venue to a data centre, but then it’s all private with that and JPEG-XS and coding the latency is very, very, very low.
Of course, our proximity to Ireland here is helpful in that regard, but even when we’re doing shows in China, Korea, and what have you, the latency is incredibly low. And having done this at Riot for 10 years, we’ve come a really long way since we were using rather more traditional technologies like satellite or even leasing our own dark fibre from third party providers.
On the technology side of things, what is exciting you about the League of Legends World Championships Finals?
So it may be hard to believe, but we’re actually really excited to lean more into stagecraft and practical effects this time around. We’ve been really excited with our use of augmented reality (AR) in the past and we are working on some things in the pipeline to change how one watches the game and to provide new advanced ways to do that that leveraging new and upcoming technologies. As far as exhibition goes, I’m not at liberty to speak on that right now, but there is some exciting stuff coming down the line.
But in terms of the technology on site, it is more about dialling in our craft as broadcasters and as visual storytellers and then leveraging that to make practical live event experience that much more special.
A big push for us this year was to unify the fan experience between what you see online and what you see in the room, part of which is to counteract some of the pitfalls of, or shortcomings of, AR technology, where it’s only cool on the broadcast and then if you’re in the room you miss out. But also to provide that kind of unified fan experience.
It’s I guess what traditional media would call like a monoculture moment. But as far as gaming and as far as esports goes, this is our monoculture moment. Whether you’re a fan of League of Legends who watches year-round and plays, whether you’re a lapsed player who only turns in for esports, or whether you’re a longtime fan who may not have watched a lot recently, but you always turn in for Worlds, it’s going to be a spectacle. And those are the people we want to reward regardless of how they engage with our game, how often they engage with our game, whether they engage with League of Legends at all, maybe they’re fans of Valorant and they’re just coming on over to League and they’re kind of curious, and we want to treat them with as much respect as everyone else.
It is about honing the craft so that we can portray the sport with the highest fidelity and the most tools in our arsenal to really bring those player stories home.