Op-Ed: Remote Commentator Is the New Normal

With the 2022 Winter Olympics right around the corner, the eyes of the broadcast world are once again on how NBC will leverage REMI production. Facing an even tougher Olympic challenge than the Summer games presented, this latest iteration of the peacock network’s well-established REMI implementation extends further the physical location of their talent. In mid-January, the Network announced that due to the pandemic, they will not be sending their announcers to China.  Instead, NBC will have them work remotely from their Sports headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut.

Calling a game and providing color from a remote location far from where the action is is nothing new. If anything, in the COVID-19 era, it became the new normal.

The pandemic forced everyone responsible for live production to find 100% safe ways to create the highest level of professional broadcasts.

Enter TVU Remote Commentator

It was in response to a broadcasters’ need for a solution calling a football match far from the pitch that TVU Networks developed Remote Commentator. Remote Commentator enables on-air announcers to work from their home, office, or literally, anywhere they have a laptop or desktop and an internet connection.

The concept was simple enough. Zoom. Slack. Teams. The idea of using the internet to connect remote parties with video and audio was well-established and easy to grasp.  However, while these solutions were good enough for business meetings and classes, the picture quality was diminished and there is considerable lag and delay in the signal. On top of that, the “technical gymnastics” required to bring these platforms into a broadcast are a nightmare.  Worse, as anyone who has had a party freeze or the audio on one of these calls drop, or worse yet have the call get “bombed” or the call drop altogether knows, those platforms are not a viable solution for broadcasters.

A cloud-native solution that is super secure, reliable, easy to operate, with low/no latency, that creates content that keeps viewers coming back, engaged, and entertained, all while keeping the staff safe and distanced. Those were the base-level expectations that Remote Commentator was built on. It grew from there.

Remote Commentator isn’t just a viable alternative it is a proven, secure, reliable, unbreakable solution. Like internet teleconferencing apps, TVU Remote Commentator announcers start with a secure sign-in through a link. Ease of use remains, but that’s where the similarities to its teleconferencing friends evaporate.

After multifactor authentication, the team of announcers (as few as one or as many as makes sense) located anywhere in the world watch a super low-latency, high-quality video feed of the event. TVU Remote Commentators cloud-native platform takes it from there, automatically making sure all of the members of the announcer team stay in 100% perfect sync.

With built-in real-time full mix-minus, all members of the announcer team hear each other flawlessly. A live commentator-only video feed allows the talent to see each other as if they were together and play off the energy and body language of one another, ensuring their chemistry is every bit as engaging from miles away as is side by side.

Remote Benefits

Protecting announcers from exposure during the pandemic is only one of the benefits of Remote Commentator. Broadcasters can now easily support different announcer teams calling the same game in different languages for different audiences.

While all announcers see the same low-latency video of the game from the same venue, each member of an announcer team calling the game in a given language only sees and hears other members of his or her announcing team. That localized game call is then output via separate audio channels in sync with game action for distribution to specified viewers.

One game, with one production crew, can have multiple feeds, with multiple revenue streams thanks to being broadcast in multiple languages from multiple announcers. Moreover, Remote Commentator is designed to be exceptionally easy to operate. Talent focused their talents on calling the game not operating complicated equipment and that is what makes the magic.

Costs are cut as well. Travel expenses drop dramatically. No more costly per diems, flights, car rentals, or hotels. The choice to have announcer teams on-site becomes just that, a choice.  Some broadcasters and sports organizations may simply accept the expenses of putting announcer teams on the road as a cost of doing business and others may see the savings as a determining factor in deciding which sports are covered and which aren’t.

For many Colleges and Universities, the hundreds to thousands per game in announcing costs that forever seemed like the only way sports could be professionally covered, can now clearly be covered for pennies on the dollar. Infrastructure free Remote Commentator has hundreds of proven success cases, exposes a school’s sports programs to a wider pool of potential recruits, and fosters a closer connection with alumni and the public at large.

Bottom Line

Viewer expectations, behavior, available technology, and workflows are all constantly evolving but for many in broadcasting the business model has remained consistent and that has been an ongoing challenge. REMI is a solid step in the right direction with TVU Networks SaaS solutions like Remote Commentator leading the way towards infrastructure free models of revenue generation that take advantage of less capital to create more cashflow, more reliably, from fewer resources.