WATERLOO — When the NBA 2K professional esports league was faced with cancellation of its third season earlier this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, its production partners Defacto Entertainment and Dome Productions turned to Waterloo’s Dejero for a solution to shift quickly to remote production.
Due to health and safety concerns related to Covid-19, the NBA 2K League’s 23 teams were prevented from gaming together in the league’s new Manhattan studio.
As a broadcast video transport specialist, Dejero was able to provide a variety of remote connectivity equipment to allow the esports league to transition its entire third season production from a studio-based model to a large-scale, pan-North-American remote gameplay production model.
“Our new Manhattan studio was evacuated suddenly during the Covid-19 shut down in New York just as our highly anticipated season three was about to start from the league’s new home,” said Chris Mitchell, senior account manager of client solutions at Dome Productions, in a Dejero news release. “With our production partner Defacto Entertainment we worked to find a solution to help us move the entire production and transmission pipeline to a remote model that combined live video feeds from 27 cities across the U.S. and Canada, which is a massive undertaking. I’m really proud that the team was able to think innovatively without much breathing room and that we could rely on hero suppliers such as Dejero.”
Dejero provided a combination of EnGo mobile transmitters and PathWay rack-mounted encoders/transmitters to Dome Productions, to address both the security challenges posed by the open source networks used by teams from their homes and the fluctuating bandwidth in those various locations at peak traffic times, the news release says. Sterilized plug-and-play kits were distributed to competing teams across North America, in order to deliver the signal strength needed in a local network that may otherwise be congested, so Dome Productions could guarantee reliable connectivity on location, says the release. As the players set up the equipment at their homes, Dome Productions’ technical support team were able to configure the encoders/transmitters remotely and operators are tasked with checking the connections in each location daily throughout this last season of 2020, which runs until the end of August.
Utilizing a Dejero WayPoint receiver, Dome Productions’ control room in Toronto (pictured) is receiving, mixing and distributing live feeds from NBA 2K teams playing in 23 different cities. Live feeds from two “casters”, located in Chicago and North Carolina, provide live commentary for the games. Defacto Entertainment is producing and directing the broadcasts in real time from their offices in Vancouver. The low latency of the return video server ensures the broadcasters in Chicago and North Carolina can comment on live feeds without lag, says the news release. Dome Productions is also able to remotely access the Dejero equipment to check parameters such as bitrate and latency.
“Dejero has allowed us to network the entire system and create a low latency game play and production value around all these local markets tied in together remotely,” added Brian Carr, who is responsible for distribution and emerging technology at Dome Productions. “We have had a very successful third season so far despite the challenges we faced. We wanted to keep the NBA 2K audience alive, especially when we were just about to kick off a season everyone was excited about.”
NBA 2K games air live on digital platforms such as YouTube and Amazon’s Twitch gaming platform. The league’s linear broadcasting partners include ESPN in the U.S. and Sportsnet in Canada.
The 2020 NBA 2K League playoffs tip off August 19 and run until August 29 when the finals are due to take place.
