Delivering a live remote audience for broadcast video production

Live TV production in front of a studio audience has come to a complete stop under the current pandemic restrictions. This vital element of our entertainment industries needs a way to bring audiences back into the mix to get fully going again.

This proposal offers a solution to bring human cheers, laughter, groans and even heckling back to viewers. We want to demonstrate a remote live audience reacting in real time to a major live esports broadcast being watched by hundreds of thousands of people. This will be a test case that will prove what's possible for TV producers of all kinds.

Leveraging the existing Weavr Audience of the Future project, we will develop and deliver a mobile app which is a customised tool for creating audience participation streams back to the studio. These will go via a server based tool for moderating and compositing these into audience views appropriate for a professional broadcast which is also developed as part of this project. The outputs will be to broadcast industry standards and also suitable for virtual studio based tools. This solution is entirely additive to the existing Weavr programme but wouldn't be possible without its strong foundation, technology and relationships. The other consortium members of Weavr are very keen to include this in the programme as they have lost their live event audience.

The project will run as a live trial at the ESLOne Hamburg tournament in late October. Once that's complete, we want to rapidly open up the results to other production companies to get live TV audiences back into productions. We want the country laughing and cheering live with the panel shows, quiz shows and sports events that are so important to our culture.