Vizrt covers Challenge Roth Triathlon
Posted on May 15, 2024 by FEED Staff
Engaging fans of action sports, anywhere
How a compact team produced the world’s biggest triathlon event, with a little help from its fans
Sponsored editorial
Nowadays, there is no content that survives long without social media, and this is particularly true in sports.
In fact, research by Vizrt revealed that a significant portion of the younger generations – 68% of Gen Z and 47% of Millennials – primarily consume sports on social media platforms.
But instead of planning different content to suit various platforms, creators can use available tech to diversify the ways fans can engage with it.
With the right technology, audiences can go from passive watchers to active participants.
That’s what DropIn-TV started doing. As a full-service agency creating streaming, linear and recorded content, it brings extreme action sports to fans all over the world.
In 2022, Manuel Durst, CEO of DropIn-TV, began looking for a simple yet complete live graphics solution to allow his team to create and publish graphics from anywhere – and he found Viz Flowics.
Without the need for downloads, hardware or coding, Viz Flowics is the most comprehensive cloud-native HTML5-based graphics platform for all production workflows.
Its brilliance, according to Durst, is in the ease of use: “It’s clear what you can do, and you don’t require any design or coding experience to create live graphics. You just have a laptop with a web browser running and add the link to Tricaster, and it is immediately there.
“We are a small team, and it’s difficult for us to have specialists. A lot of people need to be able to do different jobs. With Viz Flowics, it’s simple: drag, drop, create, playout. Even our trainees can create graphics.”
The biggest triathlon event in the world – Challenge Roth – required speed and accuracy in its coverage. DropIn-TV took it to the next level with fan engagement.
Engaging fans online
While TV stations were deploying OB trucks and a large team to cover Challenge Roth, DropIn-TV did the same with 30 people comprising its team.
This event alone gathered ten hours of live production, half a million viewers streaming and 180,000 engaging in comments via YouTube.
With Viz Flowics incorporated into its production infrastructure – which included a Tricaster 2 Elite and NDI – following the talks on social media became simpler.
“Using the Viz Flowics social media integration, everything was being done by one person,” explains Durst. Collecting and publishing comments and questions from viewers, the compact team had more output with less energy spent scrolling through it.
DropIn-TV used Viz Flowics’s advanced social media integration to engage fans with polls and questions, which were then streamed live on YouTube and posted across social media.
The team also used the integration for live question and answer sessions, including Olympic gold medallist and three-time Ironman champion Jan Frodeno.
The commentators can see all the questions live on the screen. “It was an eye-opener for Frodeno, who was commentating on a full race for the first time,” says Durst. “There was no producer feeding questions into his earpiece; the fan questions were incorporated into the graphics. He could see it on the screen and respond at once, creating a beautiful synergy with the fans.”
Scalable solutions
The feedback from the viewers, commentators and production crew was overwhelmingly positive; DropIn-TV is now looking to create the entire graphics portfolio on Viz Flowics.
Right now, Durst says the team are merely scratching the surface with what they can do with the platform – looking to use it to render out the alpha keys for graphics in post-production.
This feature was first published in the Spring 2024 issue of FEED.
