Ask someone involved with live, remote television production what motivates the adoption of a remote integration model (REMI) production, and they’ll likely tick off reasons like workflow efficiency, staffing flexibility and cost savings.
While important, the comfort level of producers in the control room and the technology available there are just as significant, said Scott Wilder, executive vice president of production and operations at Fox News, March 13 during “The Future of Remote Production” session at the TVTech Leadership Summit.
Joining Wilder on the panel was Brad Cheney, vice president of field operations and engineering at Fox Sports; Alex Ujvarosy, director of engineering at NASCAR; and Geoff Bowen, chief technology architect at Appear.
During the panel, Wilder discussed what motivated Fox News to adopt a REMI production workflow for the first time to cover the Republican National Convention in July 2024 from the Firserv Forum in Milwaukee and the following month for the Democratic National Convention from the United Center in Chicago rather than having remote production vehicles on site.
“We had a group of producers overseeing the coverage this year [2024] that… came to us and say they were, quite honestly, more comfortable in the control [room at the Fox News studio in New York City],” said Wilder.
While there were dozens of cameras on site for the conventions sending feeds to New York, the news organization was taking “probably more feeds” from around the country, he said.
“[T]he producers were more comfortable having all the technology in the control room and the ability to see every one of those remotes that were not on site. So that's what forced the decision,” said Wilder.
Fox Sports
Home run production (the Fox Sports term for REMI production) is just one of the important tools in the remote production arsenal at Fox Sports, said Cheney during the panel. Deciding whether to produce on-site, remotely or use a combination of the two comes down to deciding what’s best for the production.
“That's how we… look at it. How do we get the most production value out of these amazing people we have working for us at Fox Sports…?” he asked rhetorically.
However, there are several important benefits of employing a REMI strategy, such as working daily in the same environment promotes “better familiarity,” Cheney said.
“Today, I'm at the Big East Basketball Championship doing… those games there, and there's a familiarity of having the same operators working the same shows every day for St John's and Seton Hall…,” he said. “So, whether they're home or on the road, they're [the production team is] still taking care of the same team. They understand the players better. They understand what's going on.
“You're able to produce it at a much higher level, which is really great from that standpoint. Plus, the minute you take away the ability or need for everybody to be traveling… you get more days in the seat, and that obviously helps… increase production value as we go forward…,” said Cheney.
The Fox Sports control rooms in Los Angeles, Chicago and Charlotte, N.C., match the control rooms in the remote production vehicles the broadcaster uses. There are separate audio, video, replay and control rooms—just like in a remote vehicle, he said.
“[I]t feels the same; it looks the same, and so therefore it is the same,” he said. “And the beauty of it is, just like mobile units in the field, some days, our control rooms are doing an eight-camera college basketball show, and sometimes…they’re doing… the Big East Tournament, and they’ve got… 70 cameras coming inbound,” said Cheney.
REMI and NASCAR
Like Fox Sports, NASCAR relies on a mix of remote production strategies, but “quite a few” are REMI-based, said Ujvarosy. One example is the 33 Xfinity Series races that air on CW. They are produced with shared resources, using Fox Sports’ on-site tape rooms and camera feeds, the Dallas-based NEP facility NASCAR brought online in January 2024 and NASCAR’s facility in Concord, N.C., he said.
The NEP facility, which hosts NASCAR’s core production infrastructure, including production switchers, EVS replay, decoders and encoders, is controlled remotely from the Concord facility over three 100Gb/s AT&T lines for redundancy, he said.
“So, we are basically just a big keyboard [in Concord],” said Ujvarosy. “We have so many NEP engineers that are on site in Dallas for us, if they need to go up and reboot any gear for us. But for the most part, we’re just controlling it all remotely.”
NASCAR’s REMI model offers benefits that may not be apparent to many at first glance. “We can scale up a lot quicker than we otherwise would without having to have a lot of gear sitting around doing nothing from week to week,” he said.
Rather than renting, shipping and installing another EVS, for example, NASCAR can draw on and contribute to a pool of shared technology resources of tenants at the NEP facility and integrate them into its workflow as required. Having that degree of flexibility is essential to meeting production requirements that change frequently because races are being produced from a variety of tracks with different requirements, he said.
This model required NASCAR to address the challenge of latency, but overall, the experience has proven to be quite positive. “To be honest, most people have no idea,” he said. “If… I didn’t tell them that the switcher wasn’t on the other side of the wall…, they wouldn’t know.”
Latency Addressed
There is no “magic bullet” when it comes to addressing latency because each workflow has unique elements that must be considered and can contribute to latency, said Bowen.
“I'd love to say that there was… a one shot fits all on this, but there are multifaceted things to consider,” said Bowen.
Bowen’s company Appear, a summit sponsor, manufactures high-density contribution and signal processing solutions around compression workflows that are used frequently for large format live production to support REMI workflows. “We play a big part in the ground part of ground-to-cloud workflows, and obviously the end points… for REMI productions in general,” he said.
Encoding and decoding, the method chosen for backhaul and the type of production that will be done all are contributing factors.
“[Y]ou know JPEG XS is fantastic. It offers… the promise of a sub-one-frame encode and decode latency—to the point where actually your network transmit latency, the speed of light on fiber, is actually probably going to be far more of the… experience than the actual compression side,” said Bowen.
The panelists addressed a variety of other remote production topics as well, including: the role the pandemic played in accelerating adoption of remote workflows; what Fox News and Fox Sports have learned from one another as they collaborate on remote workflows; how Fox Sports tackled the remote production challenges it faced on Bourbon Street for its Super Bowl coverage; and the role the adoption of REMI production in the eSports arena has played in driving innovation in the toolsets broadcasters use today.
Appear’s Bowen summed up where the operators who leverage REMI workflows and the tools they use stand at present. “[I]n terms of the attitude of the operators, I think… there is a learning curve associated with adopting to any new technology,” he said. “I think that that's true across the board, and I think we're a long way along that path. I like it. I think it's a great time to be in the industry, and some very exciting tools are being developed.”
This panel and other sessions at the TV Tech Summit can be viewed on demand here.
