Recently launched as a catch-up service for all GinxTV’s video content, the Ginx+ app aims to provide the gaming and esports publisher’s audience with a centralised touch point. Understanding the demographic was a driving factor in developing the app. As GinxTV’s head of production, Rob Mackenzie, explains, the esports audience has grown and matured alongside GinxTV, and changes in both technology and demand have created the need to increase the company’s offer.
“We know that a lot of our audience is shifting towards digital marketplaces rather than linear TV, but we’re already well established as a TV channel,” he says. “We now need to find new ways to reach out to younger people as well, and we want to give users the opportunity to watch back their favourite shows. The app gives them a proper home to come and consume all our content.”
Building an audience
The company has ambitious plans to grow its audience. Ginx TV currently reaches approximately 22 million homes across the globe, with a presence in around 25 different countries. Its biggest markets are currently the UK, Canada and Germany, but, as Mackenzie says, “We’ve had a really big audience in South Africa and a few other territories, so are quite well known internationally.”
The app forms part of a strategy to reach more users, particularly during periods between tournaments. Providing year-round content will fill the gaps, as MacKenzie explains, “esports is an industry that has lots of tentpoles in the year, and there are lots of different gaming titles that individuals will be very much in tune with. But they won’t be in tune with all of them. For example, if somebody’s a Counter Strike fan, they may have a major event that they engage with once every two or three months. In those lulls between, we can provide content to keep them entertained. We want to create that home and be the go to place for esports and gaming content.”
GinxTV produces a lot of what Mackenzie calls “traditional content in the gaming space – daily news shows, game reviews, documentaries, video essays.” The company also produces exclusive entertainment content, for example, its First Hour programme features comedians playing the first hour of new game releases. Given the international nature of its audience, GinxTV is keen to increase its amount of remotely produced content. It already has staff based abroad who write, produce and edit locally.
Gameplay content is typically captured using OBS Studio software. “You can almost have a one man team running a full broadcast rather than a whole gallery crew, “ says Mackenzie. “We’ll have somebody running a mix of traditional broadcast tech but also streaming tech to run, for example, Elgato Stream Decks. Then, when we’re doing things from the gallery we’ll use vMix and more traditional vision mixers, graphics operators, sound engineers and so on.”
Tailoring the technology
While esports represents the cutting edge of innovative technology, GinxTV’s methodology is driven by the type of content being produced. More camera-focused productions, for example podcasts, are run through the gallery. “We’ll mix it live. We’ll have separate microphones and so on, run everything through vMix and then send it to the post production team,” says Mackenzie.
The team employs a range of camera equipment, again depending on the content. For studio work, Canon C300s are used along with the Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema camera. For outside work, Panasonic GH5s are used as well as Razer Kiyo webcams. “The benefit of using webcams for us is that every individual PC can run OBS itself,” Mackenzie explains. “So you can run a webcam and game capture all through one PC, and we can have four different people playing at the same time with each IBS feed coming through to our master PC, and we can vision mix between different players locally.”
Latency is a prime consideration. The sheer volume of data being simultaneously uploaded and downloaded during live gameplay streaming is an ever-present challenge felt across the whole esports content industry. The company is actively seeking a solution to the issue. “We’re exploring third party options, looking to see what options there are, short of having to ship LiveU units out to other locations, or have engineers go to other locations, we want to be able to just have streamers join us as live,” says Mackenzie. “We’re working on it.”
Predictably, graphics play a vital role across GinxTV and the Ginx+ app. As well as title cards, lower thirds and stingers, In-stream graphics are used for merchandising and calls to action during live events. All graphics are created internally using After Effects with vMix again deployed in the gallery for live productions and OBS for gameplay. The rise of AI is proving to be “incredibly beneficial”, enabling the company to generate a large volume of assets with fewer designers and operators.
Working smart with AI
As with so many others in the media and entertainment industry, AI is expected to play an increasing part in GinxTV’s future. Effectively leveraging the technology is increasing opportunities for the company, allowing them to gain “a huge amount of capability.” AI is enabling GinxTV to automate several processes, handing back time to staff and driving creativity. The company is exploring automated vision mixing in post production. Multiple format short form video versions can be quickly produced for a range of different platforms, such as Youtube, TikTok and Instagram, reducing the need for editors to perform laborious repetitive tasks.
GinxTV has also successfully deployed AI-powered audio clean-up solutions, recently filming an esports event at Wembley Arena. “[When] you’ve got hundreds of people, you’ve got lots of background noise, but the ability of this software to strip away so much of that and leave you with very clean audio is fantastic. It saves huge volumes of man hours,” says Mackenzie, another enthusiastic convert to the technology that seems to be changing everything.
The world of esports is growing. With its new Ginx+ app, the company believes it has the right product at the right time. However, Mackenzie acknowledges the competitive nature of the market, with companies pitched against influencers for audience share. As AI increases capability, he says, it becomes a harder fight. “We’ll see where that goes, but content will be king. And if we’re making the best stuff, then we’ll rise to the top.”
