EA’s eFIFA FUT Amsterdam

The final leg of the eFifa FUT Global Series playoffs took place in Amsterdam over 6 days at the end of May. 128 players from around the world competed against each other for a chance to not only win this tournament, but to qualify for the FUT Grand Finals taking place in London in early August.

Once again, Bannister Lake was called upon to provide moderated data for in show broadcast, and the venue’s digital signage.

Since the tournament took place over 6 days, the requirements weren’t as complex as Manchesters’ tournament. In Manchester, both Xbox and PS4 games were played at the same time, whereas in Amsterdam, only one console was played at a time. This of course, didn’t diminish the quality of the production, but allowed us to focus more on the individual players and games.

The biggest achievement in my opinion comes from this; A typical hockey, or baseball, or basketball or even soccer/football game, has your typical production crew. A mobile truck, with a couple dozen camera feeds, 3-4 EVS operators, Technical Director, CG operator, Audio A1 and a couple A2s, a Stats producer, Associate Director, Director and Show Producer. But for those broadcasts, it’s still a single game, taking place over 2-3 hours. An eSports tournament is hundreds of games with hundreds of players over 8-10 hours, but the broadcast demands and requires the same quality output as your single game/2-team format.

Some stats to ponder:

over 60 Xpression graphics templates built, linked to data provided by Chameleon
472 games played during this Amsterdam tournament, with 10 different stats per game
128 players, with 8 different individual stats per player
archived stats from Barcelona and Manchester totaling 944 games with 256 players
2 Xpression operators, with 4 channels of output.
2 automated Chameleon L-Bars (one with and without sponsors)
2 automated digital signage feeds for in-house signage (Xbox and PS4 content)
exclusive news feeds content, entered by the talent and EA’s social media team

With eSports broadcasts being produced more and more, with viewership increasing over the million mark, production demands will require things to be extremely efficient. Chameleon is just one of those tools that help make something like this possible.

Integrating the Chameleon into our Productions has super-charged the amount of info we’re able to communicate to our audiences. For the past 2 seasons we’ve relied on the Chameleon architecture to power our onscreen info-graphics. The system itself is very straightforward to integrate; Producers and Talent are able to update it in the heat of the action and most importantly – using Chameleon has resulted in better storytelling, and more flexibility in how we tell those stories.

TJ Walker

Boombox Group

Head of Production

Bannister Lake wishes to thank Boombox Group for choosing Chameleon as their tool of choice for displaying and moderating the tournaments’ data.

April 30, 2018November 9, 2019

EA’s FIFA eSports Manchester

The 2nd leg of the eSports FIFA eWorld Cup Tournament took place in Manchester Apr 13-15 2018. Once again Bannister Lake was hired by Boombox to assist with aggregating and moderating stats for the tournament using it’s powerful Chameleon platform. This time around however, Chameleon was truly tested to its full potential. Like the previous tournament, Chameleon was used as the central platform to aggregate data from game ops who entered in tournament scores and stats. This includes individual player stats (games played, wins, losses, goals for and against, GFA/GAA and win order) and individual game stats (Games 1/2/ET/PK results, goals/shots for player 1&2). And like the previous tournament, these stats were feeding 2 Ross XPression character generators to populate player and head to head boards throughout the tournament. This was done by using Chameleon’s restfulAPI Blade and Chameleon’s query module working with XPression’s datalinq tool using datalink keys. This method allowed for the operators to enter a player’s name in a search box, which in turn called up all the players stats.

While Chameleon was responsible for populating templates in XPression, Chameleon’s own rendering engine was used during the tournament as well, in a form of an L-Bar. In February, this L-Bar was used exclusively to showcase stats, social media and news items to the viewers, but this time, we’ve added a feature to display sponsors.

Because of Chameleon’s ability to provide AsRuns, we integrated the sponsors to be displayed on the L-Bar itself and scheduled the sponsors to appear on-air at a specific time during the day using Assets Schedule. If the L-Bar wasn’t on-air during that particular time, we used Chameleon’s Switcher app to trigger the sponsor manually as well. At the end of the tournament, we handed off a PDF of the played sponsors and their duration on screen, providing another element for the production.

In February, the production and social media staff also used Chameleon to enter news stories and filter social media entries. Like in February, the news entries being entered were used as an exclusive gateway to viewers watching, as oppose to simply relying on social media. Only viewers of the show were exposed to in-depth analysis and on the floor reporting. The influencers and casters were responsible for entering anything they heard on the floor (using an iPad) and the social media team were responsible for approving those stories before going to air.

Some new moderation features were added to Chameleon to assist with production to easily search and filter through stats. One in particular was Query Results which was used on air with talent to call up specific results. The host quizzed some of the casters with questions based on Chameleon’s queries, including top 10 goals-for players in the tournament, top 10 goals-against, and top goals-differentials, to name a few.

This wasn’t enough however, as Ncompass, one of two clients during this tournament, requested another feature be provided throughout the tournament in a form of digital signage. Especially used during day 1 of the tournament when 128 players were competing on PS4 and XBOX consoles, the players needed an easy way to see where they were in the standings and who their next match-ups would be. Using Chameleon’s channels, we provided two individual urls feeds (PS4 & XBOX) which were in turn used on about 16 monitors placed around the venue. Intel PC sticks were connected VIA HDMI with WiFi, and directed to open the urls in Chrome full screen.

A bonus added feature for digital signage was a countdown clock, informing players of the next round in the tournament, and the ability to trigger announcement and messages using Chameleon’s assets module. The messages were treated as snipes, able to trigger on/off manually or automatically based on their requirements.

To recap, our single instance of Chameleon, aggregated and moderated 128 players with their stats, with 473 games played, filtering and creating queries for the casters to monitor, populated 2 XPression systems with dozens of templates, 2 Chameleon L-Bar tickers (one with and one without sponsorship enabled) and 2 separate feeds for digital signage populating over 16 screens at the venue. All for less than $2,000.

There is a final leg to this tournament coming up at the end of May/June.

February 7, 2018November 9, 2019

EA’s FIFA eSport Tournament

Customer: BOOMBOX (Quebec)

Application: Chameleon

Platform: Chameleon Web and Ross Video XPression

Printable Version

BOOMBOX needed Chameleon to assist in filtering and moderating data, used primarily in XPression during a 3 day eSport event. Requirements include ticker, using Chameleon’s own rendering engine, and export via restfulAPI of player and tournament stats.

Data sets connected to Chameleon via database provided by Liquiddogs responsible for data entry
2 XPressions connected to Chameleon
Database filtered and populated through to XPression and Chameleon Web Player
Chameleon Web Player providing tournament L-Bar Ticker
Xpression providing player board templates to access all 128 players and their stats on the fly.

February 6, 2018November 9, 2019

Query about EA’s FIFA eTournament

Al Savoie is the Creative and Tech Director at Bannister Lake who recently worked with EA Sports to come up with way for gamer data to play out and hit the masses. The event is a marathon, taking place over 3 days with 128 players, on both Xbox and PS4 consoles. Friday was a Swiss tournament round, with Saturday and Sunday being the Bracket Elimination Rounds. Here are some industry insights from his week in Barcelona.

Can you describe the client and what they needed to happen for this tournament?

Sure, but let me give you a little background first.

With eSports tournaments becoming more popular as an event, watched by millions around the globe, eSports productions want to try to match conventional broadcast quality programming.

They want to match broadcast production, similar to what you see in NBA or NFL live events. But unlike those conventional offerings that focus on one game, eSports had 511 games over the course of the tournament increasing production demand. And keep in mind that each game is roughly twenty minutes in length so a lot of turnaround.

Camera, audio, lighting are pretty standard, but BOOMBOX Group needed a way to filter and moderate all those player stats and then display it in some way graphically. They needed a tool to allow them to easily do this. In the past they were limited in how to display player stats with such a quick turnaround – it wasn’t easy to moderate.

For example on the Friday, the first day Swiss Bracket Round, there was no way to display gamer wins or losses, goals for or against for the 128 players over the 7 Rounds. Since broadcast couldn’t focus on all the games at the same time, they needed a way to display that information for the viewers. The Chameleon provided a solution to automatically populate player stats without a need for inputting manually.

“The key idea behind BOOMBOX using Chameleon in this production was to assist in filtering and moderating data, to be used primarily in XPression on the Saturday and Sunday broadcasts, but also as a ticker using Chameleon’s own rendering engine.”

Chameleon’s Query module was required here. We needed to create APIs for XPression to easily search players based on a round and who they were playing against. Data was to be entered manually on location by the tournament ops crew, and sent over to the Chameleon database using a custom reader written by Georg at BL. Once in Chameleon, we wrote our own queries to filter what we needed for XPression.

With XPression settled, they also wanted to add another layer, in the form of the Chameleon web player, as the primary graphics system on the Friday during the very complicated Swiss format elimination round.

How many staff were involved? How does it compare to other large scale live events that Bannister has been involved in?

Well, typically Bannister Lake participates in elections in terms of live events. Our solutions are usually for tickers and branding that exist on a network, 24-7.

What makes this interesting is that an election is very similar to a lot of eSport events, in this case the candidates are the gamers, all competing and vying for a spot in the finals. It requires up to the minute stats/results. Usually elections require a lot of manpower but Chameleon doesn’t. It was a two-man job from the outset for us. Our software is designed to be very efficient; not a lot of staff required.

As for production staff, it took the same amount of people to produce NHL game, for example. For broadcast professionals, they may feel like this type of production feels cheaper only because the play out is non traditional (Youtube/Twitch), but one could argue that the amount of money is equal, if not more, than a produced NHL game. Most staff were working 12 for 14 hour days and there is a ton of work and back end effort being put into these games! On the day, using Chameleon, there were 6 production and social media staffers populating content. For a Canadian election, like the Canadian Global Television broadcast, it’s usually about twelve production staffers who will use the product.

So there were a lot of firsts for this EA eWorld Championship?

Yes. First time our Chameleon renderer was used in a live event. For the event, it was the first time being able to aggregate such a vast amount of data. That data was used on our web output that circulated player stats throughout the tournament. They used tickers in the past but nothing like this. In fact, hosts were entering info themselves! That’s the Millennial generation; instead of using Twitter, the talent used our system and created a sort of exclusive news aura, or a community, around the event.

What were some of the key benefits you told BOOMBOX about using Chameleon web as part of the production?

First, Chameleon UI being a browser based platform, made it easy for anyone to jump on and input/moderate data. Second, our Chameleon renderer outputted data where they keyed the live video overlay on top. Rather than spend thousands on a broadcast CG system, instead, they used a Chrome browser and a laptop.

Chameleon was a huge hit. The L-Bar Chameleon web ran throughout the whole weekend, displaying news, tweets, player cards and scores. Their social media team literally had a 15 minute tutorial on how to use Twitter in Chameleon, and they got it. The hosts were responsible for entering news using their iPads on the floor, with a moderation level by the EA executives. They too only had a 15 min tutorial but got it quickly.
EA, Boombox and NCompass were extremely pleased with what we offered. It really helped elevate their production to another level. One in which they now can’t go down from.

What were some of the challenges trying to manage such a large team roster? There were a total of 128 players, correct? That’s almost as large as a world championship sporting event.

Well, it is a world sport championship event. Sure it’s still one venue with everyone in that one venue but we are still talking about over 500 individual games being played. On the Chameleon end we had to make sure the leagues were separated between XBox and PS4 consoles. After that we needed to log all 128 players with their qualifying stats and upcoming tournament stats. Since we aren’t using player names, we were using “gamer tags” who love to change their tags, often up to the night before…that’s about 25% that needed to match these new names with their qualifying stats and headshots.

What’s the future of data in eSport events?

We have two tournaments coming up and we want to continue to improve Chameleon and improve what we can offer our clients, viewers and the gamers.

Al Savoie is a graphics systems whiz who can answer and further questions

Email him at asavoie@bannisterlake.com

January 31, 2018November 9, 2019

FIFA Championship Cup

CAMBRIDGE, ON 01-22-17

Today Bannister Lake announced Chameleon’s powerful graphics and data package will help publish tournament stats during the upcoming EA sports FIFA World Cup Championship.

The tournament, taking place in Barcelona, will showcase some of the worlds best EA FIFA players. Gamers from around the world have been playing hard in order to qualify for the 128 player roster on Xbox and PS4 consoles.

Chameleon HTML 5 web player will have results during the pre-bracket tournament on Friday Jan 26th. On Jan 27th and 28th, from the final 16 games to the championship match, Chameleon will collect and moderate game data, including scores, shots, goals for/against that will populate Ross’ Xpression graphics system.

“Smart, good looking interface,” says Creative and Technical Director, Alain Savoie, “ with a solid data display for real- time wins, losses and player stats during the matches. The Chameleon Web player is a great tool to show ticker data information of the matches and players, without an operator. Meanwhile, we can focus on the linear broadcast and XPression, using Chameleon’s RESTful API to populate in-game data.”

The FIFA World Cup 2018 Championship will be streamed live, all over the world, the weekend of Jan 26th.

About Bannister Lake

Bannister Lake is committed to helping great media companies tell better stories. A software company dedicated to making your media life easier, by bridging your data with high quality graphics. bannisterlake.com

November 10, 2017November 9, 2019

E-Sports as a Content Game Changer

e-Sports: Gaming as a Content Game Changer

It’s time to have a serious talk about how e-sports is changing the way people are consuming content. Endless news articles report on the “demise” of viewership on traditional cable networks but on the other end of the spectrum – where are viewers going? Hopefully this article will give cable companies and other media professionals insight on this new breed of broadcasting.

Let’s examine two recent events – King’s Cup 2017 and Overwatch World Cup 2017 where Alain Savoie, Creative and Technical Director for Bannister Lake, assisted with their live data and graphic needs. The two events are great examples of how this new medium is disrupting content for a new type of viewership.

The King’s Cup tournament is structured like a one off, a stand alone event where amateur players from around play for an opportunity to win $20k. Some 200 players competed through multiple rounds to reach a final 8 tournament joined by pro players and celebrity Youtubers. The highest amount of viewers were around 200,000 with about 1.5 million in total watching on the last day of the event.

Overwatch, was part of Blizzcon 2017. World pro players have been competing for weeks and this event included the final 8, going head to head to win bragging rights. The Anaheim Convention Arena, where this tournament took place, had about 8,000 people watching on location. At Blizzcon however, there were an extra 2 stages where other streams and events were happening.

It’s an area of media that is growing exponentially. Every year there are more subscription-based and knowledge-based gamers attending these events. The attendees have a lot of money to spare. The most recent experience at BlizzCon witnessed roughly 26,000 people at $200 per ticket. That amounts to $5 million dollars. That figure doesn’t include the virtual tickets that were also purchased nor the sponsorship that were involved during the weekend. And the sponsorship deals? They are not small. The 2 day Overwatch World Cup was sponsored by T-Mobile. Don’t forget the merchandise where it’s recommended you purchase online, ahead of time and pickup at the conference because, (as seen in the picture) the lines are long, snaking endlessly for what looks like a queue at your favorite Disney ride.

Traditional vs e-Sports: Key Comparisons

There are No Rules!

The other factor to keep in mind is that the content creators for these events don’t care about the traditional rules of broadcasting. No need for 1080i, or 2 minute commercials every 15 minutes. Kings Cup was streaming at 1080p while Overwatch was at 720p. Commercial breaks ranged between 2 minutes to 6 minutes depending on what was happening behind the scenes. The broadcast doesn’t need to end at exactly hh:mm, that said, even gamers eventually tired out. The production will always have requirements to get paid by their sponsorship partners, and therefore, frequencies of snipes and billboards vary on when to air it.

Currently live non-sporting viewership is dropping and binge watching content is rising. While the sporting events on traditional broadcasts still pull in large and relatively reliable numbers, people are still fascinated by live events and the same can be said for e-sports. The idea of a community participating in a live worldwide event at the same time, still appeals to hardcore fans, while archives of the tournaments can be watched on YouTube post-event. Try to find a complete Superbowl or Stanley Cup finals on YouTube. e sports rights holders are less concerned about distribution partially because they are the distributor.

Production Costs? What Production Costs!

Putting on a live show used to be expensive, especially in manpower. With the popularity of e-sports for the younger generation, the distribution means are not conventional and therefore viewership is generally lower. So there’s this need to produce content at a more affordable rate while still offering the same level of quality product expected in high end sporting events. Make no mistake, the event staging and tech was high end but behind the scenes the crews were generally leaner.

The stages had their four to six professional cameras feeding the studio switcher. They also had Go-Pros attached to the monitors of each player. An immediate difference to conventional sports was the actual in-game videos. Overwatch as an example, had a TD switch between all 12 players, allowing us to watch from the POV of the gamer. The replay engines are 2nd to none. For years EVS operators in sports have been responsible for capturing and playing back highlight reels of a play. In the e-sport world, some games do those highlight playbacks for you, with outstanding angles and exceptional render quality.

Deep Understanding – Know the Content!

One important observation to note is the knowledge base of the product by the viewers, who range between ages 12 to 40 years old, mostly males in their 20s. One thing’s for sure – they know their content. Watching football, baseball, soccer, and hockey, most die-hard fans know enough stats but don’t necessarily need to know how to play the games. They have a rough idea of what’s going on.

Content and viewing games such as Overwatch, Clash of the Clans, Call of Duty, and like, demands a viewer’s undivided attention. There are different game plays, maneuvers, strategies, equipment, and stats that are not immediately obvious to newcomers. The content is delivered and therefore ingested very quickly. It’s easy to follow a baseball game, but it’s a lot harder following Overwatch.

Who’s There?

The attendees also lineup to play games. Rows of computers are setup for people to play the game and there are easily hour long line ups to play them.

The majority of attendees were white males in their twenties, with a fair share of white females. Plenty of Asian players as well but noticeably lacking were African American players.

Assume that each of these attendees is going to go home and buy this game. Therefore, there’s a large sum of money being made by the gaming industry. Their goals with having the Championship matches streamed is to attract more viewers for higher ratings in sponsorship money which then also leads to merchandise sales and perhaps the sales in the game itself.

As for the professional players, they’re well structured and organized. There’s a committee for each team to select the players, there’s a captain on the team as well as a coach. The players form strategies in the games and the hard-core fans know who they are and how they’ll play. The pro-players aren’t kids arriving in sweatpants and t-shirts. They are sponsored and dressed in proper uniforms, representing their country. They take this very seriously.

Future of traditional cable and e-sports

Is there a future in cable and e-sports? Will cable companies embrace this new medium? They haven’t so far. YouTube, Facebook and Twitch have. Tellingly, that’s where the new generation is going for their consummation of content. TBS stations are showcasing some redistributed content on occasion. And there are some new streaming channels being created, dedicated for watching games.

So what’s next?

Since the medium is relatively new, there’s a lot of research and development still being made in how to distribute and display this content. In the traditional sporting world, data and score bugs have been in the works for years, where in most cases these days, you can get data directly from the arena. With e-sports, the game developers haven’t fully developed the integration with broadcasting in mind, so a lot of data and results and stats are manually being entered, or being transferred in a more manual method.

Games will eventually improve as well. Virtual reality will eventually let viewers watch the game from inside the game as it’s being played. Certain game styles may also develop stories to go along with the sports itself. And although for now, some of these games are tournaments, there’s no reason why EA’s FIFA or MADDEN, won’t eventually include a year long season, with pro-teams, training facilities, players, draftees, general managers, coaches and captains. This also means camera crews, TD’s, audio techs, CG ops, EVS ops and others are needed to produce these events. Even the Olympic and NCAA committees are discussing the possibilities of including these e-sports into their organizations.

As for the production itself, foreign streams will become more important as e-sports isn’t necessarily regional, but rather international. Conventionally, Olympics and International tournaments require the distribution be done by the destination country, e-sports tournaments are produced and distributed at the source. So multiple language streams and data will increase viewership and therefore revenue, followed by the necessity to develop content for those streams.

Baby Boomers as parents didn’t understand the appeal of Gen X’s fascination with Atari and Nintendo. Those platforms generated millions of dollars and created the infrastructure that launched Millennial’s interest in gaming. Gen Xers are creating at the same level as Millennials and will soon be overtaken by their interests so current generations shouldn’t ignore Millennials interests in this e-sports world.