Remote production is a way of broadcasting a live event in which the cameras and microphones are at the venue, but the director, the replay operators and most of the crew work in a control room in another city. The camera feeds travel to that control room over high-speed computer networks. It is also called remote integration, REMI, or at-home production. It replaces the outside-broadcast van, often called an OB van: a truck full of production equipment that is parked at the ground, with its crew.
What stays at the ground, and what moves? The camera operators stay, because someone must point each camera at the play. The microphones, a small number of engineers and the equipment that sends the feeds also stay. The vision mixer, the replay servers, the graphics computers, the sound desk and most of the people move to a central control room. That control room can produce one match in the afternoon and another match, in a different city, in the evening.
Consider a professional kabaddi match at an indoor stadium in Patna, produced from a control room in Mumbai. Eight cameras and twelve microphones cover the mat and the crowd. At the stadium, the feeds are converted into data packets, as described in video over IP. They are sent to Mumbai over two separate fibre-optic links, which follow different routes, so that the match stays on air if one link is cut. The delay between Patna and Mumbai is a fraction of a second. In Mumbai, the feeds arrive at a broadcast video router. The director cuts between the cameras, the replay operators record every camera, and commentators add commentary in Hindi and English. The finished programme goes to playout. In the old way, an OB van and about 40 people would have travelled to Patna. Now perhaps 15 people travel, and the rest work from Mumbai.
The camera operators in Patna and the director in Mumbai must work as one team. They talk over an intercom system that runs over the same network. Even small adjustments, such as the brightness of each camera, are often made by engineers in Mumbai, who control the cameras over the network.
Why do broadcasters do this? Fewer people and less equipment have to travel, so each match costs less to produce. One control room can cover more matches in a season. This matters for sports that draw smaller audiences than cricket, which could not otherwise pay for a full OB van. The risk is the network: if both links fail, the broadcast stops. So broadcasters pay for links with guaranteed capacity, and test them before each match. Some broadcasters now run the control room's equipment as software in the cloud, and AI tools add replays, graphics and commentary in more languages; see AI-generated content.