Remote production for endurance races

The problem

Trail and endurance races run through remote desert and mountain terrain. There is no venue network and the course is spread over many miles.

The production used to travel from race to race: a full control room set up under a couple of tents, often in conditions that were far from ideal, for every event.

What I built

• A REMI studio that replaced the travelling control room. Commentators, field teams and drone pilots stay on site; the full control room runs from Phoenix, where the crew talks to every team and controls audio and video and what goes to air.
• A control room of 3 to 5 people in Phoenix directing roughly 20 races a year (and growing each season), with 4 drone pilots, 4 field videographers, a team of 3 to 5 commentators, a director and a few bike cams on the course.
• End-to-end broadcast infrastructure with 20+ cameras per race on an ATEM Constellation 4 M/E (hardware panel plus software control, with SuperSource for multi-box layouts).
• Field-to-studio transport over Teradek bags, Peplink bonded cellular and Starlink, with NDI and SRT encoders moving video feeds to and from the commentators.
• Talkback in Zoom ISO, better crew comms through Unity, and Unity Intercom Connect carrying audio to and from the commentators.
• Isolated feeds ingested through DeckLink PCIe cards in a Mac Studio, alongside Dante audio on a dedicated VLAN; Midas M32R and Behringer X32/SD8 consoles over AES50.
• Cueing from Stream Deck and Bitfocus, and a custom graphics solution built in house.

How it fits together

Results

• The control room no longer travels from race to race or sets up under tents: it runs from one place in Phoenix with the teams on the course connected to it.
• Yearly views across the broadcasts grew from 484K in 2021 to 2.8M in 2025, and are at 4.8M so far in 2026. Peak concurrent viewers reached 44.5K in 2025.
• Technical director for the recurring race broadcasts, roughly 20 races a year and growing.

• 4.8Mviews so far in 2026
• 2.8Mviews in 2025, up from 484K in 2021
• 44.5Kpeak concurrent viewers (2025)
• 838Khours watched so far in 2026

Views by race

YouTube views per race series across the Mountain Outpost broadcasts. 2026 is a partial year.

How it used to run

Tools

• ATEM Constellation 4 M/E
• Teradek
• Peplink
• Starlink
• NDI
• SRT
• DeckLink
• Dante
• Unity Intercom
• Zoom ISO
• Midas M32R
• Behringer X32
• Bitfocus