Electronic Arts Competitive Gaming Entertainment has chosen GV AMPP (Agile Media Processing Platform) to enable fully distributed, remote production for FIFA 21 and Apex Legends.

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Electronic Arts Competitive Gaming Entertainment (CGE) has chosen Grass Valley’s GV AMPP (Agile Media Processing Platform) to enable remote production for FIFA 21 and Apex Legends. 

The two new competitive gaming events will be produced by team members working at their homes with the end-to-end cloud workflow. It will utilise Grass Valley’s GV Korona switcher control panel connected over the public internet to a K-Frame production centre engine running on GV AMPP.

The Grass Valley system will be used on an ongoing basis for the 2020-2021 FIFA World Cup qualifying tournaments, having already worked on an Apex Legends live tournament in December. It also worked on the FIFA 21 Global Series European Qualifier 1 Event, 12-13 December.

For that event, 20 camera feeds from Europe and additional live contribution feeds for the talent came into an AWS datacentre in Northern Virginia and EA’s Technical Director Geoff Butler punched the show using GV K-Frame on AMPP from his base in Sacramento, CA. 

Joe Lynch, EA CGE’s head of broadcast, said: “We learned a live production in the cloud brings together several unrelated systems, creating a lot of complexity — if one part of the workflow fails, the entire system falls down. These were unique, unprecedented circumstances to solve for during COVID-19 in order to continue esports competition.

“Grass Valley’s GV AMPP was a helpful solution, bringing all of our needs together within one harmonized ecosystem. AMPP gives us a professional broadcast quality platform – in the cloud – with the production values and the reliability that we need to give our fans the best experience. For our operators, using K-Frame in the cloud was seamless, with no perceivable difference to working in a studio environment.”

Grass Valley CEO and president, Tim Shoulders, added: “The project with EA is also a fantastic example of how today’s workflows need to pivot rapidly – whether that’s to work around a global pandemic or to keep pace with diverse audience demands. We are extremely proud that AMPP plays a central role in EA’s production capability, helping the team innovate to deliver the creative content for which they are known.”