Pickleball is a rapidly growing sport around the world & when I was first introduced to it a few years ago I wondered how I could be a part of it. Turns out my place wasn’t necessarily to be on the court itself, but on the sidelines live streaming it to the world!
In 2019, I was asked to create some promotional content of the Elliott family’s visit to the Gold Coast & Brisbane for the Australian Pickleball Championships & the first dedicated Pickleball courts in Australia at Halcyon Greens. It turned out that the Elliott’s were, and are, akin to Pickleball royalty due to their involvement with the game in the USA & their business Engage Pickleball…but luckily very approachable, friendly royalty!
With that fantastic introduction for me to the sport of Pickleball & the community growing around it, the story now jumps to 2020. With the sudden onset of COVID lockdowns & a great deal of time on my hands, I decided it was an amazing opportunity to learn about live streaming as the world came to terms with remotely accessing their work & personal life through tools like Zoom.
Through much trial & error I settled on a live streaming rig built around software called Switcher Studio, which enables the use iPhones as cameras and an iPad to switch between them in a multi-camera setup. This system allows flexibility & a minimal footprint on site, incorporates the use of a range of customisable onscreen graphics & allows me to bring in professionally captured audio from multiple sources to the stream.
This ‘downtime’ during the COVID lockdowns also allowed me to learn how to access a stable internet connection from a variety of concurrent sources, and how to manage & optimise these sources so that dropouts & connection issues don’t distract your live stream audience from your event or content!
In 2023 I was invited to live stream the Oceania Pickleball Open on the Gold Coast, my first 5 day immersion into the world of Pickleball tournaments, or ‘tourneys’ as I believe they are known! Following this I was asked to live stream an event in Bali and the European Finals in Austria.
These tournaments exposed me to ‘extremes’ of Pickleball live streaming like capturing both indoor & outdoor events, troubleshooting internet issues in vastly different international environments and adapting to the heat & humidity in Bali, then sub-zero temperatures in a ski resort village in Austria!
These events also allowed me to meet members of the worldwide Pickleball community that have attended these events as players, spectators & crew…people that I now call friends.
2024 found me criss-crossing Asia live streaming Pickleball from Thailand, China, India, South Korea and Vietnam. In the latter half of 2024 I was invited to take over broadcasting for PPA Tour Australia (PPAA) and Major League Pickleball Australia (MLPA), which has included tournaments at the Gold Coast, Melbourne and Vietnam.
To cap off the year, Vidion was selected to broadcast the Trilogy Funds Australian Pickleball Championships in October 2024, the largest gathering of pickleball players in the Southern Hemisphere.
2025 got off to a flying start, broadcasting multiple courts from the Proton Australia Pickleball Open held at the Melbourne Convention & Exhibition Centre. This was the first overseas tournament hosted by the USA PPA Tour and it was a great experience to work alongside the USA broadcast team! The remainder of 2025 will see me working again with PPAA and MLPA across their events in Australia and New Zealand.
My lofty aim is to replicate the best aspects of the top tier Pickleball coverage coming out of the USA - which uses large teams of crew on the ground & a range of high end broadcasting tech – as a ‘one man band’ operation. My background & technical experience as a videographer allows me to capture great video & audio for these Pickleball live streams, but also has given me the practical experience of dealing with the invariable issues that can present themselves during a live event or broadcast.
This leads me to my final, but very important point. With so much going on with the action on court & the potential issues with a live stream, there is a lot of multitasking required. I dedicate myself to managing that multitasking & leave the commentary to the professionals. I don’t offer commentary as a service that Vidion directly provides, but I do have contacts who are experienced commentators & just love to talk about Pickleball who I can recommend for that role.
While the future is looking pretty awesome already with a range of tournaments across Australia & further afield already locked in for Vidion, if you have a Pickleball tournament that you’d like to live stream please reach out and we can discuss a solution for your event.
Or...if you tried a DIY Pickleball live stream at your event & ran into problems please reach out. I have found myself working with Pickleball event organisers from Australia to Asia to Austria as a Pickleball Broadcast Consultant to troubleshoot and enhance their Pickleball live streams!
I can’t promise I can troubleshoot every scenario but I’ll do what I can to help.