Attendances at non-league football grounds are quietly climbing, with Non-League Day 2026 attracting nearly 12% more fans than the previous year. Making sure broadcast quality keeps pace with that growth can be a challenge, and it’s one that High Viz Media is addressing. But to serve this audience, the company needed to find a different production model.
The economics of outside broadcast have been built around trucks, large crews and equipment designed to deliver Premier League-scale productions. Those models work when the audience and commercial return justify them, but they become increasingly difficult to sustain when trying to cover hundreds of lower league fixtures across dozens of venues.
That was the challenge for High Viz Media when it became the broadcast facilities partner for National League, National League North and National League South coverage for DAZN, something that amounts to more than 600 matches a season across 41 different stadiums with varied connectivity.
“It required us to rethink the traditional OB model from the ground up and what we built has delivered every single match without a transmission failure,” says company owner, Nick Collier.
While the classic outside broadcast model is resilient and capable, a significant portion of a traditional OB budget goes towards infrastructure such as fixed gallery positions, on-site engineering crews, heavy cabling runs, and truck logistics. This makes sense when producing content for a mass broadcast audience. But lower league clubs increasingly want to give the fans something more than a low-quality stream from a single static camera. Rights holders, sponsors, and fans now expect a professional broadcast product, regardless of where the match sits in the football pyramid.
A REMI model built for scale
High Viz Media’s solution is built around remote integration production, but refined specifically for the operational reality of lower-league football. The core principle is to keep the crew and the intelligence centralised and send out only what is essential to each venue. Camera operators are drawn from a network of trusted freelancers positioned in geographical hubs, which reduces travel costs and carbon emissions and brings regular work to a local area.
Each match is covered by a single multi-skilled camera operator on site. That operator is responsible for capture and on-site transmission, supported by the software and engineering managerial team at base. No feed has been lost across 647 matches spanning 41 venues without guaranteed connectivity.
The purpose-built MCR near Heathrow is where the production lives. From there, a lean team manages live graphics, syncing, transmission and distribution across up to 16 concurrent feeds. Fewer operators can oversee more live games than the usual REMI production due to the use of smart API and data-driven workflows. This model dramatically reduces the on-site footprint without sacrificing broadcast quality.
The economics of centralisation
The financial logic makes sense too. By centralising the skilled production resource in one location and rotating a much smaller on-site footprint between venues, the cost per match drops while the output quality remains broadcast-standard. The more matches the model covers, the more efficient it becomes.
Collier adds: “The model we have built for the National League is, we believe, a blueprint for how broadcast infrastructure can be made genuinely accessible to sports rights holders further down the pyramid. For leagues and rights holders thinking about broadcast, the question is no longer whether a professional product is possible within a realistic budget. It is whether you have the right production partner to build the workflow that makes it viable. We did it for 600 matches. We can do it for yours.”
