Esports production shares many qualities with live sports, but sound engineering is a whole new game. IBC365 explores the complexities of controlling who hears what in a crucible of noise.
Sound has always played a major part in the gaming experience. Gunshots, revving engines and screeching tyres are the obvious aural signatures of shoot-’em-ups and auto-based games but supporting these are subtler backgrounds and atmospheres that help create the various environments in which players find themselves. All this carries over to the large-scale, multi-player, arena-based world of esports, but the live, professional nature of this increasingly popular form of game-playing calls for specific audio techniques that set it apart from its home counterpart.
The main difference is the scale, with the games taking place in an arena and involving a large number of people, all of whom need to hear what is going on. Cameron O’Neill, Country Manager for broadcast facilities company NEP Japan, divides those involved into three categories: the sports group, comprising the competitors and their support teams (coaches and backup players) plus the referees ensuring everyone plays by the rules; the audience, live production teams and the announcers/commentators, known in esports as ‘shoutcasters’; and the broadcast and streaming crews producing coverage of the events...
You are not signed in
Only registered users can read the rest of this article.
Branded entertainment: Money, freedom, and audiences unite
As traditional broadcasters battle decreasing budgets and attention spans, brands have come to the fore as collaborators in an increasingly lucrative and creatively fertile strand of the media business.
FRAMES: Automating the archive end-to-end
Despite the availability of hundreds of generative AI tools, pre-production environments are still struggling to find a semantic archive search solution that is technically feasible and effective in the real world. Enter FRAMES.
 (1).png)
IBC Accelerator: Scaling the future of immersive festival experiences
Stepping beyond the screen, this IBC Accelerator project has set out to meld immersive technology and audience interaction into an entirely new form of audience engagement.
Content Everywhere: From AI promise to commercial reality
If IBC2025 was defined by conversations about artificial intelligence’s transformative potential, the past 12 months have been about proving where it can deliver tangible business value. CE exhibitors now describe a market that has become more pragmatic.
IBC Incubator: Connecting context for end-to-end agentic production
After years of AI experimentation, this year, the IBC Incubator plans to birth a single, agentic brain that can hold every bit of a story’s context from conception to distribution.
