How RSPN Built a Broadcast That Feels Like ESPN — and Why They Walked Away from SRT
RSPN (RoSportProgrammingNetwork) is an independent esports broadcast team producing live American football coverage for a large Roblox-based league. Operating without sponsors or a physical studio, the team delivers broadcasts that intentionally mirror the pacing, polish, and structure of mainstream sports television.
This case study is based on direct conversations with Mason Kleinhuizen, who leads production and technical decision-making for RSPN.
When Mason Kleinhuizen talks about RSPN, he is quick to set expectations.
They are not a traditional media company. Not a venture-backed startup. Not a monetized production house.
RSPN is a distributed group of students, hobbyists, and aspiring broadcasters who care deeply about one thing: producing live sports broadcasts that feel professional — even when the sport itself exists entirely inside Roblox.
“I grew up watching live sports and paying attention to how broadcasts were made,” Mason says. “The graphics, the camera cuts, the replays. I wanted RSPN to feel like what I saw on ESPN or Fox.”
That philosophy has shaped RSPN’s production approach for more than five years.
A Real Audience With Real Expectations
The league RSPN covers may be virtual, but its audience is not small.
Over the years, broadcasts on the RoSportProgrammingNetwork Twitch channel have accumulated hundreds of thousands of total views, with peak live audiences reaching 1,000+ concurrent viewers. The league itself has roughly 50,000 members, with thousands actively participating.
Despite this scale, revenue remains minimal. Mason estimates their most recent major broadcast earned around $50 from Twitch ads, barely enough to cover licensing costs.
“That doesn’t lower expectations,” Mason explains. “When people tune in live, they expect it to work. If video glitches or audio drifts, they notice immediately.”
Where the Technical Cracks Appeared
For a long time, RSPN relied on SRT to bring remote camera feeds into vMix.
On paper, it seemed sufficient. In practice, it introduced uncertainty into nearly every broadcast.
“Sometimes it worked. Other times it would break into blocks or glitch mid-play,” Mason says. “Latency wasn’t consistent, and artifacts were the biggest issue.”
Because RSPN works with multiple remote operators — each on different networks and hardware — quality varied dramatically from feed to feed. Fixes that helped one operator would fail for another.
For live sports, that unpredictability became a serious risk.
Why RSPN Switched to Video Transport
The recommendation came through other esports producers in a shared Discord community — teams facing the same remote production challenges.
The difference was immediately measurable.
“With Video Transport, we were consistently seeing around 300 milliseconds of latency,” Mason says. “With SRT, latency was often over half a second and fluctuated during games. That breaks replays and commentary timing.”
Video quality stabilized as well. Full HD at 60 fps. No macroblocking. No guessing which feed might degrade mid-game.
But performance alone wasn’t the deciding factor.
“It just worked out of the box.”
Camera operators downloaded the app, selected a source, and were live — without complex networking or repeated troubleshooting.
Reducing On-Air Risk Through Smarter Setup
For RSPN’s largest broadcast to date — a five-year league anniversary event — the team spent three weeks in pre-production, coordinating 15+ contributors across graphics, planning, and operations.
On show day:
- 9 people were active in the live production
- commentators, camera operators, replay, director, co-director
- a dedicated operator controlling virtual crowd noise
To reduce risk, Mason split responsibilities across two machines:
- one PC dedicated to receiving Video Transport feeds and converting them to NDI
- a second PC running vMix for the final program output
“Everything could run on one system, and it did,” Mason says. “But separating it gave me peace of mind. I didn’t want performance to be something I worried about while we were live.”
Control Without Bottlenecks
Another major improvement was Video Transport’s web-based admin dashboard.
Through it, Mason could:
- distribute licenses remotely
- let trusted team members manage incoming feeds
- preview sources without interrupting the live production
“With SRT, only one person could receive a feed at a time,” he explains. “With Video Transport, the same feed can be viewed by the director, replay operator, and anyone else who needs it — instantly.”
For a distributed volunteer team, that flexibility removed a major coordination bottleneck.
Why the Cost Made Sense
Video Transport is not free, and Mason doesn’t avoid that point.
“But the time you save — and the stress you avoid — make it worth it,” he says. “You’re not spending hours configuring things or hoping they behave once you’re live.”
For RSPN, reliability mattered more than another workaround.
“If you can afford it and care about broadcast quality, it’s absolutely worth paying for.”
One Sentence, From the User
When asked to describe Video Transport in simple terms, Mason Kleinhuizen answers without hesitation:
“Low-latency, high-quality live video that’s actually easy to use.”
For RSPN and the RoSportProgrammingNetwork channel, that combination removed a persistent technical risk — and replaced it with confidence that the broadcast would simply work.