Germany’s TV Skyline has been using the world’s first installation of Maverick control panels in a remote production setup for one of the world’s biggest online events. OB7, the firm’s next-generation OB van, was recently on hand to cover the live national championships of the League of Legends event in Cologne in co-operation with Riot Games. Each month more than 32 million people in nearly 150 countries play League of Legends, a virtual team-based fighting game.
The OB7 truck, with three control rooms served by a Snell Kahuna 360, is the first to feature multiple installations of the new Maverick flexible switcher control surface. “The heart of the van is the Kahuna 360,” said CEO and founder Wolfgang Reeh. “We have three Maverick panels, with the largest installed in the truck’s big control room. We have 5MEs in OB7, but the system can be configured to do up to 20 mix effects.”
“As well as League of Legends, TV Skyline covers a lot of large-scale cultural and media promotional events,” said Stefan Geradts, Snell’s sales director for Central and Eastern Europe. “Maverick is a modular concept where all the building blocks of the control panel are self-contained. It’s thus possible to reshape the control panel to many individual applications.”
“We used OB7 and 22 cameras to show two teams playing League of Legends in front of 3,000 people and streamed to a global internet audience of millions,” said Reeh. “The production concept is twofold. There is local production on site, but 21 HD-SDI signals are sent over to Los Angeles to enable remote production.”
The company has now also manufactured two flypack systems with around 30 cameras, both with Kahuna Maverick panels, Snell series 830 routers and fibre technology to handle the final tournaments in South Korea – with remote production again being run from Los Angeles.