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LONDON — For an audio-only medium, radio has a long history of broadcasting highly visual events and performances. Somewhat incongruously, ventriloquism was immensely popular on radio in both the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, while sports commentaries have been a mainstay of the medium since its early days, a tradition that continues today. Following in these footsteps is esports, with broadcasters, including the British Forces Broadcasting Service, bringing the excitement and virtual worlds of gaming — an otherwise visually oriented phenomenon — to its listeners.
With a high proportion of young people in its ranks, computer gaming is a hugely popular pastime among U.K. forces personnel. BFBS reflects this in not only its radio and TV broadcasts but also in its interactions with the listening and viewing communities, overseen by Head of Esports Robert Wylie. The broadcaster this year further demonstrated its commitment to the area, which continues to grow in reach and popularity, by inaugurating the BFBS Pro League. The Grand Final was broadcast live through BFBS platforms on Sept. 25.
“It is like traditional commentary as people would know it — you could have your eyes closed and still know what is going on”
BFBS Broadcast engineer James Smith on covering esports
Broadcast engineer James Smith oversaw the presentation and says the BFBS audience’s enthusiasm for esports was the driving force behind the event and its coverage. “The military is sports crazy and it’s a very young workforce, typically between 18 and 40,” he explains. “Video gaming is just part of their lives, and BFBS has traditionally always covered lots of sports, including football, so esports felt like a natural continuation of that.”
Smith admits that, until recently, BFBS did not have a “huge amount of knowledge in-house,” which led to the creation of a new department, with a head of esports and community and operations managers. BFBS radio and TV broadcast updates on the Pro League, with highlights on the broadcaster’s social media platforms. Alongside this was a dedicated podcast, The Lobby, presented by esports community manager and army veteran Jonah Jupp and breakfast show co-host Danni G.
An incredible set-up
The Grand Final of the Pro League featured eight teams from the U.K.’s Armed Forces community — including serving members, their families, cadets and veterans — competing against each other in the vehicular football video game, Rocket League. The event took place in the Esports Broadcasting Hub within the Beacon Building on the University of Staffordshire campus. “We looked at a few places where we could do this, and because the University of Staffordshire teaches esports, they’ve got all the equipment, which meant we didn’t have to hire stuff in and build things,” Smith says. “It’s an incredible setup that has an arena, including bleachers, but also a traditional studio.”
The Esports Broadcasting Hub was built in 2018 and is based on an IP audio and video infrastructure. Equipment includes the NewTek (now owned by Vizrt) VMC-1R video mix engine and 2-Stripe Control Surface, which run on network device interface interconnectivity technology, as well as a Yamaha 01v96i digital audio mixing console. “They’ve also got cameras on the studio floor and the outputs come into the vision mixer as NDI feeds, with the audio coming out as Dante audio-over-IP feeds into the sound desk,” Smith explains. “It’s a very impressive setup, so we used all the equipment that was there and sent the finished output back to our headquarters in Chalfont, Buckinghamshire, using LiveU transmission systems, after which it was recorded as well as broadcast live around the world.”
Negotiating the constraints
While the Hub provided the core technology installed to capture esports competitions, the BFBS team had to work around the constraints of using equipment not specifically designed for their needs. “All their audio was Dante, but there was still a mixture because Staffordshire works on a Panasonic Kairos IP/IT platform. To get the outputs from that they use an EVS Neuron IP-SDI gateway and processor to bring out the physical connections,” Smith says. “We took it as SDI video with the audio embedded and sent that through the LiveU. We did have some difficulty with Wi-Fi connections, which we rely on a lot for our live broadcasts, because the university was cautious about what we could plug into their network.”
The Hub also offers areas for presenters and commentators, as well as specialized esports workstations that can handle six-versus-six gaming competitions. BFBS Sport reporter Simon Hunter was the main presenter in the arena, with Danni G on the radio coverage. Smith explains that the commentary for esports on the radio is in the same style as other sports coverage for the medium, with more description of what is happening than on TV. “It is like traditional commentary as people would know it,” he says. “You could have your eyes closed and still know what is going on.” The players and their teams, also being miked up, add another descriptive and immersive element to the coverage.
The final was live-streamed across BFBS Esports YouTube and Twitch outlets, with updates on Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok. There were also reports into all BFBS live radio shows on the day between 10 a.m. and approximately 7 p.m. Smith observes that the way esports is broadcast illustrates how different media forms have converged in recent years. “When I first started at BFBS, we had an IT department and a small TV division, which another company ran, and I was in radio,” he says. “Over the years, the job has changed hugely. You can go on an outside broadcast for radio, and somebody also wants to film it. And these days we’re all IT engineers. We used to have analog sound desks that went through hardware switchers, but today everything is IP. It’s as much an IT job as it is a traditional broadcast engineering job.”
The BFBS Pro League Grand Finals were live-streamed for over nine hours, a first for the broadcast team. However, Smith say the event has given them plenty to work with for the future. “It was the first time we’d done anything like this, and it went really well,” he concludes. “It was a huge success, but there are loads of things you think of afterward that we could have done differently had we known. So next year will be a different beast entirely.”
The author trained as a radio journalist and worked for British Forces Broadcasting Service Radio as a technical operator, producer and presenter before moving into magazine writing during the late 1980s. He recently returned to radio through his involvement in an online station where he lives on the south coast of England.
This story originally appeared in the March/April 2026 edition of RedTech Magazine. You can read or download it for free here.
You can access all past RedTech publications, for free, here.
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