Vizrt paves way for little ELF to gain high-end production tools

The European League of Football (ELF), a professional league promoting American football in Europe, was looking to improve viewer experiences with new features, advanced graphics, and increased video quality.  Also looking to increase value for sponsors with improved advertising options, while reducing production costs and carbon footprint, the ELF decided to move all its live productions to the cloud.

Realising that the flexibility of a “best-in-breed” approach to the league’s required live production tools, combined with the scalability of cloud infrastructure was essential to its continued success, the ELF turned to Vizrt and AWS to support its transition to the cloud.

Vizrt and AWS proposed an end-to-end cloud setup powered by the Vizrt Live Production Solution and selected third-party tools all connected by NDI. By choosing cloud, the ELF and its production agency, Novel.Media, have access to high-end live production tools usually out of reach of niche sports broadcasters. 

Exciting image-based augmented reality (AR) graphics and virtual advertising are powered by Viz Arena, with software-based video/audio switching made possible with Viz Vectar Plus. Graphics are rendered in real-time using Viz Engine, and 3Play by Viz Now ensures no moment is missed with unmatched replay and slow-motion.

To achieve the tight deadline, deploying Viz Now saved weeks of deployment and setup time by automating the deployments into AWS to provide a simple portal to spin up and delete the live production environments as needed.

The full end-to-end cloud live production system was completed in less than three weeks for over 100 American football matches for its 2023 season.