Launched in September 2024, Super League Basketball (SLB) is the governing organisation of both men’s and women’s professional leagues.
As part of the establishment of competition, SLB struck a valuable media deal with DAZN, which broadcasts all games—often as many as 10 in a weekend; 240 games in a season. To support this extensive commitment, SLB needed a production partner that could cover the whole UK and deliver the production values that sports fans demand.
Live production specialist Brandvox stepped up to the basket, winning the contract to cover every game. It delivers complete packaged content to DAZN.
The challenge
Brandvox needed to get equipment, crew and commentary to arenas the length and breadth of the UK, and aimed to deliver completed live transmissions in consistent broadcast quality. It also had to design, build and roll out its solution in a very short timeframe.
“From the ashes of the previous basketball organisation, SLB was formed, secured a media deal, and played its first games in just a few weeks,” explains Nic Acton, co-founder and director of Brandvox. “Remote production was the obvious solution: send the kit to the stadiums and bring all the signals back to our galleries in our headquarters.”
Acton needed to look beyond the simple remote production environment. First, he wanted a one-piece solution: not just video and audio feeds from the stadium to the hub in Bristol, but all the other circuits, including talkback, data and return video, so the commentators on site could see the output and replays.
Second, while many of the city-based teams were in state-of-the-art stadiums with excellent connectivity, others had more challenging broadband environments, so Brandvox needed a system that could make the very best out of the available bitrate.
The solution
Acton was aware of Intinor for live remote production, and brought them into the project early. “We knew that Brandvox had just a couple of weeks to get this right,” says Daniel Lundstedt, head of sales and marketing at Intinor. “That was fine by us: we like to get involved in creating the workflows.”
Each venue is equipped with Intinor Direkt links as part of the overall setup. These take in video signals and prepare them for delivery over whatever bandwidth is available, allowing the signals to be carried across broadband connections.
Intinor’s proprietary Bifrost transport protocol is designed specifically for high-quality video over the public internet. Built for real-world network conditions, it combines powerful forward error correction, re-sending and network bonding to compensate for signal disturbances and ensure maximum stability and resilience.
“We are broadcasting live, so minimising latency is important to us,” Acton says. “Intinor provides a direct, point-to-point signal path—it’s not bounced through the cloud. That keeps the latency, and the cost, down.
“At the same time, there is a management layer in the cloud, which gives us access from wherever we need it,” he continued. “The flexibility of the cloud allows us to manage the entire network from anywhere in the world, and anyone who needs to monitor a signal can pick it up.”
The result
Today, Intinor handles all contribution feeds from stadiums to Brandvox’s production hub in Bristol, as well as delivery of programme outputs to multiple partners. Each game typically involves around six different feeds in various formats, all predefined and automatically applied as needed.
“This is an area that’s often underestimated,” says Lundstedt. “Live sports content is delivered to multiple destinations: broadcasters, streaming platforms, betting partners and archives. Production teams don’t want to manually configure every destination and risk errors. Our goal is to make it as close to plug-and-play as possible.”
The workflow has now been proven across hundreds of hours of live basketball coverage, delivering consistent broadcast quality from venues with widely varying network conditions. By using the public internet combined with Intinor’s transport technology, Brandvox has achieved a highly reliable and cost-effective alternative to uncompressed dedicated fibre networks, without compromising latency or quality for internet streaming.
Now well into the league’s second season, Brandvox reflects positively on its choice of technology.
“We have delivered hundreds of hours of live production without issues,” says Acton. “When we have had questions, the Intinor team has always been there and extremely responsive. The support has been exceptional. We now rely on Intinor for all our live productions and we see them as our most valued partner.”
Products used
- Intinor Direkt router rack
- Intinor Direkt link rack
- Bifrost transport protocol
- Intinor Direkt Management (IDM)
