How SMT mastered multi-sport production at the Chengdu World Games 2025
- 18 December 2025
Held over ten days in August 2025, the Chengdu World Games brought together nearly 4,000 athletes from 116 countries, competing across 34 sports and 256 medal events. With a global audience expecting coverage of the highest level, SMT faced intense pressure to deliver a flawless, large-scale broadcast operation that met the event’s strict requirements for stability, complete functionality, and responsiveness.
To achieve this, SMT needed a modular solution that combined the reliability of mature broadcast systems with the agility, scalability, and efficiency demanded by modern multi-venue, multi-sport productions. The solution also had to accommodate local production requirements while supporting a global broadcast footprint.
After evaluating multiple options, SMT selected EVS’s MediaCeption solution for comprehensive media management, combined with LiveCeption for replays and highlights, forming the foundation of its production strategy.
Producing an event of this magnitude meant having to manage and orchestrate a large number of simultaneous production workflows. SMT required a centralized system; without it, the broadcaster risked facing fragmented workflows, redundant media transfers, inconsistent versions, slow turnaround, and a higher risk of editorial and operational errors.
The core challenge was to create a unified, end-to-end environment capable of supporting:
- High-volume ingest and structured media management
- Fast-turnaround highlights and clip creation
- Editing from rough cuts to tight integration with craft edit environments
- Comprehensive metadata logging and content enrichment
- Virtualized deployments to accommodate last-minute change requests from ISB
- Efficient archiving and retrieval for later re-use
- Direct, timely distribution to international rights holders
- Reliable, 24/7 live playout
All in all, SMT needed a “central nervous system” for the entire operation: scalable, integrated, and built for real-time collaboration across multiple teams and formats.
“Partnering with EVS goes beyond technology – it’s about joining forces to achieve outcomes neither of us could reach alone. By combining EVS's innovation with SMT's deep localization expertise, we've established a model for China's next-generation broadcast infrastructure.”
SMT worked closely with EVS to design a customized system built around EVS’s MediaCeption and LiveCeption solutions. In collaboration with ISB, SMT’s production teams engaged in multiple rounds of technical discussions and joint system design to ensure the solution aligned precisely with ISB’s requirements while leveraging EVS’s product strengths.
The final solution powered 20 workstations, nine craft-edit suites, and a fully integrated highlight-production and playout workflow.
Within this tightly unified production backbone, all feeds were ingested directly into EVS production servers, creating a real-time media hub where operators could log, enrich, and use the while being recorded.
Teams were able to access growing files instantly, cut replays of key moments of the competition within seconds, and published them straight back to the EVS network for immediate playout or delivery to rights-holders.
Rough cuts moved seamlessly into Adobe Premiere Pro for finishing, then made available in the EVS environment. Metadata logs built by SMT’s teams provided deep, timecoded searchability across thousands of assets captured from the multiple sports disciplines and key moments of the event.
With every workstation tied to the same synchronized media platform, SMT’s teams worked in parallel – ingesting, logging, editing, playout out, and distributing – all throughout the event.
Another key aspect of the project for SMT was the use of virtualization technology, which improved server resource efficiency and increased deployment flexibility. This helped SMT to respond rapidly to last-minute changes from ISB and optimize system configuration after the event.
The overall system was designed around a modular architecture, enabling components to be split, reassembled, and redeployed as needed. This modularity created a reusable technical foundation for future events, effectively balancing short-term project delivery with long-term resource utilization.
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Fast turnaround
MediaCeption enabled SMT’s production teams to quickly locate, create, organize clips through intuitive interfaces and lightning-fast content search tools.
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Production scalability
Additional resources were added easily where required by SMT, enabling smooth and reliable operations even for such global production scale.
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Flexibility and optimization
EVS enabled VM-deployed workflows, empowering SMT to achieve carbon footprint efficiencies, and versatile resource allocation, adjustments and scaling.
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Extensive logging capabilities
The SMT logging team were able to implement flexible metadata profiles and timecoded annotations to the live content to fit the editorial needs of the production.
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Enhanced collaboration
The solution provided instant access to both EVS video server content as well as traditional storage solutions ensuring efficient collaboration between production teams.
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Efficient large event deployment
EVS expertise enabled SMT to reduce installation time, minimizing resource requirements and operational risk.
Within their decision-making process, SMT felt EVS’s solution stood out ahead of alternatives because it met immediate operational needs while offering the possibility to support future long-term workflows, including cloud integration and AI-driven production.
EVS’s strong global support was another critical factor. The onsite EVS China team provided technical support throughout all 12 days, ensuring consistent, confident system performance from setup through live production.
Through EVS’s MediaCeption and LiveCeption solutions, SMT delivered a unified, reliable, and scalable production workflow for the Chengdu World Games 2025. The project successfully balanced advanced functionality, cost-efficiency, deployment flexibility, and long-term sustainability—meeting immediate event requirements while remaining reusable for future productions.
Beyond ensuring high-quality global coverage, the project demonstrated SMT’s ability to deliver advanced, innovative broadcasting systems efficiently and reliably, even under tight timelines and budget constraints. The deployment has since been recognized as a best-practice reference within the industry.
This workflow will now be extended across multiple upcoming projects, further strengthening SMT’s technical capabilities and competitive position in the global broadcast market.
EVS continues to shape the live production of major global sports events through its ever-evolving media asset platform, enabling hybrid-cloud operations, AI-driven content enrichment, and a next-generation broadcast architecture.