| How YouTube plans to pull off Friday’s NFL live game |
This year, football season kicks off with a twist: Following tonight’s season opener, YouTube will stream the NFL’s first Friday game of the season — a face-off between the Los Angeles Chargers and the Kansas City Chiefs broadcast live from São Paulo, Brazil — for free to a global audience this Friday.
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It’s the first time YouTube has hosted such a high-caliber US sports event in front of the paywall, and the Google-owned video service is pulling out all the bells and whistles for the occasion. There will be drones. There will be over 50 cameras. Karol G will perform the halftime show. And in addition to live commentary from broadcast veteran Rich Eisen and Hall of Famer Kurt Warner, fans will also be able to watch the game with livestreams from YouTube creators like IShowSpeed and SKabeche.
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But that’s only half the story. I’ve had the chance to exclusively talk to some of the folks at YouTube involved in Friday’s event over the last couple of weeks about how the broadcast came together. That’s how I learned that there’s not just a plan B and a plan C to deal with unforeseen network outages, but even a last-resort, Hail Mary fallback solution internally known as the “Doomsday Armageddon scenario.”
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| YouTube has been running tests for weeks |
To pull off such a high-level event, YouTube has brought on NBC as a production partner. The broadcaster aired the Brazil NFL game on Peacock in 2024 and is handling much of the on-location production work for YouTube. “A lot of the gear and equipment that NBC used last year is coming back this year,” says YouTube sports partner engagement manager Adam Masterson. That includes what’s known in the broadcast industry as a flypack solution — basically, a studio in a box (okay, many boxes) that you can ship to places where rolling up with a production truck just isn’t feasible — custom-designed for this location.
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“NBC is the greatest shipping production company in the world because of the Olympics,” Masterson explains.
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 | The replay room in São Paulo. Photo courtesy of Adam Masterson / YouTube
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Together, the two companies built out a pop-up production compound in São Paulo over the past couple of weeks, which has been online and running daily test transmissions since late August. These include testing every camera and all the local equipment, but also sending test broadcasts back to YouTube in the United States. Turns out that’s not quite as simple as just going to YouTube and clicking the “Go live” button, as regular creators do.
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“Getting a game from the stadium in Brazil back to YouTube TV for this one-time-only event, through NBC, requires some bespoke architecture,” Masterson says. The raw broadcast feed is delivered via what Masterson calls “custom fiber solutions” to an NBC facility in Stamford, Connecticut. From there, it’s being sent to NBC’s 30 Rock studio in New York for production control, then to another NBC facility in Colorado, from where it is being handed over to YouTube.
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Sounds complicated? That’s why YouTube isn’t leaving anything to fate. In addition to the fiber cables, there will also be a satellite link on standby as a backup solution to get that feed to NBC. If all that fails, there’s a plan C: an internet-based video link, known as an SRT feed, to a local YouTube data center in Brazil, effectively bypassing NBC altogether.
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And yes, there is always that plan D: “If our fiber goes bad, and if our satellite goes bad, and God forbid the SRT solution goes bad, we have something called our Doomsday Armageddon scenario, which is basically a guy with a camera and a LiveU backpack,” Masterson says. This would essentially allow YouTube to go live with a single camera feed, produced on the fly by one camera operator, and streamed over a cellular connection, much in the same way traditional broadcasters sometimes go live from areas of civil unrest.
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