On Saturday, the National Women’s Soccer League crowned its fifth champion. While it has lately faced inconsistencies with team ownership, the NWSL is the longest-surviving American domestic women’s league. Fans could watch the NWSL Championship on Lifetime and stream the match on myLifetime.com.

The season began with a big announcement: A+E Networks invested in the league with an equity stake. Together, the two launched a 50/50 joint venture called NWSL Media, which handles the broadcasting rights, production, website, and sponsorship of its properties.

The NWSL, which previously streamed its games on YouTube, would begin a Game of the Week on A+E’s Lifetime linear channel and website. Domestic viewing of the rest of its games moved to Verizon’s go90 and international viewing to its own NWSLSoccer.com.

A+E didn’t just want to be the broadcaster. They wanted to bet on the NWSL at a time when women’s soccer is trending upward. Revenue for the World Cup Champion Women’s National Team even surpassed the Men’s in 2015.

“We’re optimistic about the development of women’s soccer in this country and that the time is now for the game to really cement its stronghold in the country,” A+E Executive VP in digital Evan Silverman said.

“It’s extremely important to grow the visibility of the league and the players. The NWSL game and the product itself is tremendous. We just need to expose it to more fans.”

The Process

In less than 10 weeks before the start of the season, NWSL Media revamped its entire infrastructure. It hired VISTA Worldlink to handle the production workflow for the non-televised games, and brought in video services provider Simplestream to rebuild NWSL’s website and establish its live streaming and VOD operation.

Production

NWSL deploys on-site production trucks for Lifetime’s Game of the Week, but at a price tag in the neighborhood of $10,000 per event for facilities alone, the league didn’t have the budget to supply nearly 100 streamed games with the same resources.

VISTA, based in South Florida with a long history of providing satellite transmission services, devised a workflow similar to another client, the United Soccer League: regardless of stadium, camera feeds are transmitted across the country to control rooms at VISTA’s headquarters, where the entire game is produced.

It’s called remote integration — and broadcasters all over the world are adopting the model to cut costs. With the REMI model, for short, the NWSL can ensure the production of a full slate of games and retain creative control of the streams.

“We wanted a consistent high-quality production across these games and it just made sense to have it centralized,” A+E’s Silverman said. “There’s a rich resource of talent in South Florida that we can draw upon, and that has worked extremely well to date.”

The producer, director, graphics, audio, replay operators, and even the announcers work out of the Fort Lauderdale location. The director has real-time two-way communication with camera operators at the game, even though the crew might be as much as 3,000 miles apart.

VISTA adds another unique cost-saving piece to the transmission puzzle: instead of using more expensive traditional fiber to transmit all the video and audio signals from the stadium to control room, VISTA uses existing stadium internet connectivity to transmit to the ISP. The data is converted back to fiber for final delivery to the control room.

Distribution

The finished product is delivered via fiber to Verizon’s go90 and is transmitted to Simplestream’s servers for NWSL’s site.

Simplestream, which A+E had invested in an earlier product, created a cloud-based platform for NWSL, including an integration with Opta stats. Play-by-play and match events are visible to the users, and NWSL’s small team of producers can use Opta to more quickly find and distribute game highlights via a browser-based editor.

The lack of a revenue stream and A+E’s investment illustrate why the league migrated away from YouTube, and the league has been working on providing the same accessibility to games that YouTube provided.

Lifetime’s Game of the Week required cable subscription authentication and Verizon’s go90 was riddled with stream malfunctions early in the season. One team’s owner called the technical issues “a debacle.”

However, Silverman estimated 100,000 viewers per Lifetime broadcast and an average 25,000 streams per game. Even if the transition to A+E’s preferred broadcasting model hit some growing pains this season, it appears to be adding stability to the league’s business.