As part of its MLB World Tour, Major League Baseball staged the World Baseball Classic Qualifiers in Taipei from Feb. 21–25, 2025. MLB Network was tasked with producing a high-quality, English-language broadcast of the games for domestic and international audiences. However, its traditional control rooms were already booked for other productions, and building out a dedicated facility or sending a large team overseas wasn’t viable for a short, one-off event. The network needed a scalable solution that could deliver full production capabilities with minimal physical infrastructure — and without sacrificing reliability or production value.

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MLB Network used the BitFire Platform, which incorporates award-winning cloud production tools and IP transport technology, to implement an end-to-end remote production workflow. In addition to providing a full suite of production tools within a cloud production environment, the platform ensured low-latency, deterministic video and audio transport, allowing the entire show to be produced in the cloud while monitored from an ancillary “control room” in a non-broadcast office space at MLB Network’s Secaucus, New Jersey, headquarters.

BitFire shipped a preconfigured flypack to the Taipei Dome, built and tested in the company’s engineering facility prior to shipment. The kit integrated seamlessly with a locally rented audio console and featured AES67 audio-over-IP support, allowing direct ingest of MADI streams into BitFire’s transport network. On site, all inbound video and audio signals were encoded and transmitted over the BitFire Transport network into the BitFire Spark cloud production environment. BitFire’s deterministic latency and synchronized A/V ensured that all feeds arrived in real time and in sync, eliminating the need for post-ingest alignment.

“To ensure good quality audio and video delivered to the BitFfire servers, we added a Calrec Brio audio console to receive all analog and MADI audio sources from the Taipei WBC rightsholder mobile unit,” explains Carlos Gonzalez, technical manager. “This was with the intention of being able to have an on-site mix and to isolate any issues that might arise before delivering the product to the cloud. On the video side, we had multiple video transports and DAs set up, with the ability to look at them locally before going into the servers, as well as afterward on the fancy BitFfire multiviewer received on the decoder of the BitFfire server.”

Within Spark, MLB Network managed switching, graphics insertion, playback, and the delivery of both clean and dirty program feeds. The production team in Secaucus used BitFire’s FireBridge for multiview monitoring and low-latency signal confidence. BitFire also routed final program outputs — including graphics and English-language commentary — back to Taipei so that announcers and production staff could monitor in real time. With the entire workflow running in the cloud and only three to four MLB personnel required on site, the production dramatically reduced travel and logistical overhead without compromising quality.

“This was our first instance using the fully mature Spark product,” says Joe Alvaro, production engineering manager at MLB Network. “In October, we had used an early version of the product to create an alt-cast for the India market for the postseason, which was a great learning experience for us. Using what we learned and working together with the team at BitFfire, we were able to design a control room and workflows that allowed for a production that the viewer would have difficulty knowing came together in the cloud. And with the flexibility of the platform, as the productions went on, the team was able to get more and more ambitious with what they put on the screen.”