How we Keep Virtual Livestreaming Triathlons Interesting

One of the effects of a pandemic is the need for change in our everyday lives. BCC Live has been a production company for many years, but much of our work has been at event venues. Well, that isn’t happening now, so our customer and our team asked how can we still have sport without being able to compete together.

The answer is virtually, but what can we do to make our experience different, more engaging, innovative and fun. Plenty of people are doing virtual bike races, but no one is tackling the run quite like this.

Our vision – we put the run in the hands of the athletes and their crew. For the first round, our team took the reins and filmed. Then we created a way to inject the GPS data into a video file. Thinking it would be interesting to show elevation profile, we added that next. Of course, the audience would want to see where the athletes are on the elevation profile in relation to the other athletes, so we added that. Then we figured the audience would want to see where on a map each athlete was running so that was included.

Once proof of concept was in place, we handed it off to the athletes. They determined their courses, used their own phones/camera and had their quaranteam film them and used the GPS from their watches to clock their time. Check out the results – pretty cool right?!?

See the examples below, but if you are interested in going deep on the whole project, you can watch the entire show here

Here is an under 2-minute video supercut of the longer 14-minute video to show the different elements in action.

Video: https://vimeo.com/438723766?embedded=true&source=video_title&owner=7705319