Dorna’s MotoGP Accelerates Remote Content Production on AWS and Grabyo

MotoGP is a leader in motorcycle racing events. Managed by Dorna Sports (Dorna), its exclusive commercial and television rights holder, MotoGP showcases the world’s top road racers every year. In 2020, this event featured 20 events in 17 countries. Operating at global scale, with a virtually limitless supply of compelling video content, Dorna needs an innovative content strategy. 

As its content strategy grew in scope and ambition, Dorna turned to Grabyo, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Advanced Technology Partner, to help make it a reality. Equipped with Grabyo, a cloud-based system for live and real-time video production powered by AWS, Dorna has been able to grow its global audience, bringing fans more ways to enjoy race-day action and greater access to the riders, teams, and sponsors that drive the sport of motorcycle racing.

With 22 riders vying for the top spot at speeds exceeding 220 mph, each MotoGP event delivers nonstop action across the 8-month season. To enable audiences to catch every start, pass, and podium finish, Dorna and its broadcast partners deploy 180 cameras, produce more than 60 continuous video feeds, and employ hundreds of staff at each racing venue. The result is a wealth of racing action and behind-the-scenes drama to be captured, edited, and published in real time to feed the MotoGP.com website and VideoPass, MotoGP’s popular direct-to-consumer service. 

Dorna transformed its content strategy to create a regular output of video assets tailored for specific outlets across broadcast, over-the-top video services, and social media. To take advantage of the abundance of footage from each 4-day race event while growing its library of long-form, preproduced content, Dorna would need a new approach to content production that could scale up its weekly content release as much as 35 percent without significantly increasing the staffing levels, travel obligations, and workload of its content team.

Dorna chose to move its content production workflows to Grabyo, which offers broadcasters, service providers, and rights holders a comprehensive browser-based production solution in the cloud, where they can edit videos and publish, distribute, and monetize content assets across digital media in real time. 

Built on AWS, Grabyo lets content teams create and distribute live broadcasts and near-live video clips from live events to virtually anywhere. It provides low latency by harnessing an array of AWS services, including Amazon CloudFront—a fast content delivery network service—to enable content creators to work in sync with live events, capturing, editing, and publishing from onsite or across the world. Channel-specific publishing workflows streamline the job of adapting content for distribution across over-the-top services, mobile apps, the web, and the social media gamut. Then content can be gated by geography to enable localized campaigns or observe territorial media rights, and content scheduling and expiration tools let users like Dorna manage media rights workflows. 

Dorna uses Grabyo Editor and Grabyo Producer to edit, produce, and distribute digital content to all media services, including its social media channels, as well as to provide content to riders, race teams, sponsors, and broadcasters to feed their promotional efforts. Built-in monetization features make it simple to insert ad breaks into content and manage promotional campaigns across platforms using Grabyo’s direct integration with Twitter in-stream advertising, Facebook branded content, and YouTube Content ID. Every type of asset—from long-form, preproduced content to live, on-the-fly clips—is managed and distributed through Grabyo. Social media experts at Dorna work continuously through the race week to transform spectacular moments into real-time highlights and post them to social media with the right text, tags, and timing. They do so using Grabyo Studio software running on AWS, including live clipping for instant publishing from live feeds, editor for making quick small edits, and producer for creating live content.

With Grabyo, Dorna can centralize its live and on-demand content development within its production center in Barcelona. Regardless of where a race takes place, the Dorna production team can collaborate remotely with its on-location counterparts. The Grabyo system on AWS achieves 120 ms latency from European race locations to the production center and 400 ms latency to Barcelona from outside of Europe, helping the production team at Dorna publish highlights and stream live video content within seconds of the on-track action. 

Over an 11-month production cycle, remote content production accrues significant benefits to Dorna’s bottom line. The ability to produce content remotely has boosted output for content creators at Dorna and led to significant cost reductions in travel and equipment. With fewer outside broadcasting trucks needed and fewer creative staff onsite, Dorna can focus more resources on its product rather than its overhead. And for creative staff who no longer spend as many as 120 days a year on the road, it provides substantial quality-of-life benefits. 

Grabyo also enables Dorna to produce more MotoGP content more efficiently. Tasks that previously took 5 hours, such as editing, processing, and publishing a series of race-day highlight packages, can be finished in less than an hour. Social media workflows are so streamlined that the same staff can create and post 10 times more content than before. It has also expanded its library of preproduced content and added new social media channels to its distribution with the goal of reaching new audiences who can become new fans. 

In the competition for social media engagement, speed is critical. Using Grabyo’s solution, Dorna can share the moment of victory within 30 seconds of a racer crossing the finish line. Its expanded content strategy has unlocked new licensing opportunities with sponsors and teams, creating additional revenue streams and increasing exposure for its content. Supported by its transformed content strategy, MotoGP enjoys visibility that is up more than 100 percent in 2 years, with 2.2 billion video views on social media in 2019.

Supported by AWS Partner Grabyo, Dorna has shifted into overdrive, transforming its strategy for live broadcast with its MotoGP workflow, bringing the brand firmly into the digital age while streamlining costs and boosting awareness, engagement, and content production. According to Manel Arroyo, managing director of Dorna, “Launching a live remote production studio using Grabyo on AWS helped us not only produce more unique content for our VideoPass streaming service but also create and share exclusive live content, highlights, and interviews for racers, race teams, and sponsors at a fraction of the cost of onsite production.”