Philippe Moreau, a member of FFVL Board, and the president of CDVL of Savoie, shares the way they organized live streaming at the 18th FAI World Paragliding Championships.

Here is the edited recording of his interview published on FAI CIVL Facebook page.

"In this competition, we do the show on webTV with the purpose to present the whole race live. The main challenge that we face is to transmit data in real-time. You know it is easy to make some filming and show the best moments of the competition afterward. But that is not what we want to do. What we want to do is broadcast the whole competition from take off to the landing live.

It was quite complicated. The first time I wanted to do it, I went to some company to organize that. And they told me "That's very easy we will make a big plane turning above the race and some helicopters..."  and I said " Stop-stop-stop...we are not Coca-cola, we are not tennis and not Formula 1, I do not have a budget with 6 zeros.

We found a solution. It was quite easy. We use several iPhone cameras and some mobile application that sends broadcasts of our cameras to the TV director's center that we organized here at HQ. We have 8 cameras and they cover the whole competition scene that allows us to run the show.

We have cameras on some volunteering competitors and also we have cameras on some good non-competing pilots with movie-making skills who follow the race. Of course, they do not make the same course as the pilots on the task, but they use their knowledge to understand at which turn point of the task they should be to make a good video report. One of them is Antoine Boisselier, who makes movies and is well-known in France, the second is Philippe Broers, who is from Belgium and makes a lot of videos on socials. And the third is Jean-Michele Ara who is also a good video-maker.

We use live tracking a little bit. It is for us a very good tool to present the task. Also before the race begins we use live tracking to explain to the audience what is the task for today and what are the potential options. Every morning I talk to Jac Fournier, the Meet director, who gives me more information about the task. After that, during the race, we also sometimes show live tracking to make an overview of the race. Our cameras use a 4G mobile network and if we lose one or two cameras it is OK, but sometimes all of them fall out of connection so then we use live tracking.

We invite some good sportsmen as commentators. I have Jonatan Marin who is a well-known paragliding pilot and also Frederique Bangue who is a European champion in athletics. She does not know anything about paragliding but she asks good questions that allow us to explain the sport to everybody. She asks "How are you doing this or how are you doing that, what is the meaning of this word.." So these are the main two people that follow the race with me.

We also invite guests. Celebrities. They do not know anything about paragliding. First, they make tandem flights, and after we invite them to talk to us about their own experience. We welcomed here the winner of "Top Chef" - the show of restaurant chefs. And we will receive the French climbing Champion, we will receive the Olympic Gold medal winner of ice skating. Among paragliders, we interview the winner of the race or the pilot in a good position. We can talk mainly in French. Sometimes in English when we have someone who can make interviews in English better than I.  Also sometimes in Spanish - Steve Ham is on the take-off every day interviewing pilots for us. We include some of these interviews in our streaming. So we hope that people from many countries will watch and can understand even if they do not speak French. There is a chat and a lot of people ask for more English. We will try to do it."

Webcastor TV directing team at PG Worlds 2023 in France: Jacques Bouchet, Melissa Tholot, Remy Perrier, and Mathieu Camel.

The link to the interview https://www.facebook.com/fai.civl

The link to the live streaming of the 18th FAI World Paragliding Championships https://paraglide.webtv.live/en