A sports broadcaster delivers sub-second contribution from a temporary venue

The Customer - An international sports broadcaster producing live coverage of a two-week multi-venue tournament, with the primary venue a temporary stadium build on the outskirts of an Indian city and production galleries in London and Singapore feeding regional distribution.

The Situation - The venue had no permanent fibre, and the broadcaster's default plan for temporary sites was satellite contribution with a backup satellite path. Satellite meant several seconds of latency, which complicated two-way presenter links and interactive segments, and the cost of dual satellite capacity for two weeks was substantial. The broadcaster wanted to bring the venue onto a terrestrial IP contribution model - multiple camera feeds and return video over managed IP using SRT - but only if the network could deliver deterministic, sub-second latency to both galleries with a resilience story it could trust for live output.

The Challenge - Contribution-grade video is unforgiving of loss and jitter, and the venue's temporary status meant everything had to be built and removed within a short window. The requirements were four 50 Mbps contribution feeds plus a return path to each gallery, under one second glass-to-glass, on two physically diverse paths, with automatic failover that would not be visible on air. India-to-London and India-to-Singapore paths had to be engineered for stable latency rather than best effort, and the whole build had to be ready for rehearsals ten days before the opening ceremony. Local permits for temporary works and the seasonal risk of heavy rain added constraints on how and where circuits could be delivered.

What We Did - Our media and connectivity teams delivered two physically diverse temporary fibre circuits into the venue from separate local carrier routes, terminating on Dollu's Mumbai PoP, plus a bonded 5G path as a third route for return video and communications. From Mumbai, contribution traffic rode Dollu's private backbone to our London and Singapore PoPs, with dedicated capacity reserved and latency held stable rather than routed over the public internet. Contribution used SRT with a tuned latency budget on each path, redundant SRT streams sent simultaneously over both fibre routes with seamless switching at the receive gateways in the galleries, and encoders and decoders configured and burned in at the venue during the rehearsal window. On-site engineers stayed for the build and the first two match days, with Dollu's NOC monitoring path performance throughout and a direct line to the broadcaster's gallery engineers.

The Results - Every live session across the 14 days was delivered at under one second glass-to-glass into both galleries, with measured end-to-end latency typically between 600 and 800 milliseconds and jitter well within the SRT buffer. Automatic path failover was exercised twice - once during a local fibre cut caused by construction traffic and once during a heavy-rain event - and neither was visible on air. The satellite backup that the broadcaster had retained as a contingency was never used. Total contribution cost for the event came in materially below the dual-satellite plan, and the lower latency allowed the production to run two-way presenter segments between the venue and the London studio that had previously been avoided. The broadcaster has since adopted the same design as its standard for temporary venues in the region.