Drone and TriCaster Power Coverage of Cross Country Championships

Cross Country competitions pose a geographical challenge for coverage that stadium-based events do not. Drones add an extra perspective to stadium-based events that are already well-supplied with points of view that provide insight in detail into the action on the field. However, they offer much more than just another angle for a sport that is spread over a wide area, such as cross country running - they put the sport on the map from a coverage standpoint, by offering points of view that instantaneously tell the story of the action more completely and clearly than any ground-based camera looking into a pack of runners passing by could ever do.

This was what Richmond University’s SpiderTV sports video team discovered when they added a DJI Phantom 3 professional quadcopter with HDMI output module as one of the sources they feed to their TriCaster at such events, and applied when the Atlantic 10 Conference selected them to cover the 2015 Cross Country championships.

A1011-300x166 “…that overhead view … gave a sense of who was in the lead and where the rest of the pack was,” said Drew Dickerson, Assistant Commissioner at the A-10. “This opens the door to a lot of other possibilities for us, including events that are harder to do from a streaming standpoint.”