Riot Games Picks Nevion’s IP Remote Production Solution

Nevion, a Sony Group Company and award-winning provider of virtualized media production solutions, announced today that Riot Games, the publisher of the world’s most-played PC game, and the organization behind League of Legends Esports (LoL Esports), has chosen Nevion solutions and services to support their global IP remote production project known as Project Stryker.

As esports explode in popularity across the globe, Riot Games is building a global production system to produce live events anywhere, anytime from centralized production data centers. Its new remote broadcast and content production center (RBC) in Dublin, Ireland is the first of multiple to be built and interconnected to provide a global follow-the-sun production model, with each able to produce several events simultaneously based on time zone requirements. Nevion is providing the solution to orchestrate media flows between the remote venues and the RBC, across Riot’s wide area network (WAN), known as Riot Direct.

The solution provided is to be built around Nevion’s software-defined media node, Virtuoso and its orchestration and SDN control software, VideoIPath.

The Virtuosos will be deployed in the SMPTE ST 2110 enabled data centers, and in mobile “contribution kits” to be taken to event locations as needed. The media nodes will provide several media functions to transport flows across the network, including SDI/SMPTE ST 2110 adaption, JPEG XS low latency video compression, MADI processing and transport and IPME (IP media edge) functionality for LAN to WAN hand-off, multicast to unicast conversion, and flow protection.

Riot first deployed Nevion Virtuoso with JPEG XS in remote production of League of Legends World Championship Final in 2019 – one of the world’s first uses of the compression technology. This year, Riot completed the successful integration of MADI over IP/SMPTE ST 2110 between Los Angeles and Reykjavik during the League of Legends World Championship in Iceland.

VideoIPath will function as a single orchestration layer for the WAN media connectivity, enabling Riot to quickly connect contribution kits with centralized production infrastructure in the data centers.

To that end, VideoIPath will provide dynamic connection and orchestrate all media flows, carefully managing and optimizing the use of bandwidth. It will also configure the Virtuoso media node adaptation, JPEG XS compression and flow protection to fit different production requirements – with integrated service-level monitoring.

Scott Adametz, Senior Manager of Infrastructure Engineering at Riot Games explains: “We are embarking on an ambitious plan to develop new production and operations workflows that will support our growth from a single-game esports company to a multigame future. Having worked with Nevion for a couple of years already, we knew that Nevion’s products, expertise and experience would enable us to build an IP solution that would allow for more global efficiency for our esports productions.”

Thomas Heinzer, CEO at Nevion adds: “Riot Games are real pioneers in live production, and we’re always proud to be part of their innovative projects, from their first use of JPEG XS two years ago, to this latest venture to create a truly global production capability.”

For more information about Nevion and its solutions, please visit the Nevion website.