Premier League champions Arsenal trophy parade

Champions: Live from N5 A million fans. No signal. 3½ hours live.

Arsenal’s first league title in a generation. Three open-top buses. A 5.6-mile loop from the Emirates through Islington, and a crowd Islington Council put at over a million.

Champions: Live from N5 ran for three and a half hours across Arsenal’s YouTube channel, app and website, Facebook and X. The YouTube stream alone has since been watched more than 1.2 million times. We built it, and a crew of around 30 produced it from Enfield.

Here’s the problem. Put a million people in the same streets and the mobile networks fold. Almost every fan was filming, posting or calling, and public 4G and 5G along the route were unusable. That’s exactly what most live broadcasts from a moving vehicle rely on.

So we didn’t rely on it. On the buses, several Starlink dishes were bonded into one connection: lose a dish, keep the pictures. Every LiveU encoder also had access to our own private 5G network, well away from the crowd’s traffic. GPS tracking put every bus on a map in our gallery, so we knew exactly where each one was.

Above the route, a helicopter and three drones, with the helicopter’s downlink rigged on a rooftop overlooking the parade. At the Emirates, presenters ran a studio show over the top, carried back to us by OBE encoders on private fibre. And for the stadium’s event and safety control room, we put in a temporary 10 Gbps connection.

All 15 sources landed in our control room in Enfield. We cut them on a Ross Video switcher and sent the programme everywhere at once: onto Arsenal’s own channels, and out over BT Media & Broadcast and SRT to the UK’s major broadcasters, who took our feed for their news coverage.

The networks gave out. The pictures didn’t.