Alongside the growth of in-house REMI studios, independent remote-production service providers expanded into providing full REMI services and commentary on contract to other events and leagues. For example, VISTA Worldlink, which had engaged in global-commentary rebroadcasts of Major League Soccer (MLS) and CONCACAF matches, expanded into providing full REMI services and commentary on contract to United Soccer League competitions, National Women's Soccer League (NWSL), the U.S. Open Cup, and MLS.
Sports leagues with smaller broadcast budgets began deploying REMI productions to allow for more live-broadcast and livestreamed matches. For example, with A+E as a broadcast partner in 2016, the National Women's Soccer League produced match livestreams using REMI practices with budgets as small as $10,000 per match, compared to $50,000 to $100,000 for television broadcasts using a production truck. The Premier Hockey Federation used REMI production to expand its match availability to its full season and produce its first linear television broadcasts. NASCAR consolidated its remote production to a studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2019 where it produced 30 events remotely.
This workflow also allows commentators to call events from the live feeds without being on-site. For example, all NBC Sports commentary of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing was done remotely.
REMI productions rely on IP transport from the venue to the remote production facility, which can be subject to outages if redundant transport methods aren't available on-site. Failures can result in compression artifacts or outages, which can affect the collection of sports analytics data and social media coverage of live events. Players in the NWSL complained when match footage was unavailable for review, or when camera angles weren't available to review goals or important plays.
Tight budgets facilitated by REMI production can result in low-quality productions that doesn't meet viewers' expectations, leading to organizers being forced to increase spending on equipment and on-site staff to compensate.
Off-site commentators are limited to what cameras and microphones can record and can be tasked with calling several consecutive games per day, leading to facutal errors, omissions, and mischaracterizations of an event's atmosphere. On-site staff can be subject to communications latency from off-site producers. Commentary can become sufficiently delayed from live events to be recognized by viewers. Viewers can also recognize attempts to make commentators sound or appear to be reporting live from an event when they're remote.
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