In a single month, ASN put a commentator in a boat at Padang Padang, streamed ten padel courts across two venues at once, and proved that a subscriber-funded model can carry a surf contest. Here’s how it happened.
The wave stands up on the reef and the commentator doesn’t need a monitor to call it. He’s sitting in the boat, 20 metres from the take-off, wireless microphone in hand, describing a barrel he can see with his own eyes. On the beach, five hundred metres away, a crowd watches the same moment on a big screen while the audio comes through the PA. Back in the OB truck, a director cuts between the two.
That was one afternoon at the Rip Curl Cup. The season has had a lot of afternoons like it.
Honestly, this article was a bit of a mess to pull together. How do we show everything we’ve done, in one post and somehow make it, make sense? We’re proud of all the systems we’ve built and implemented recently but to you, as a general viewer (if that is you), it all means nothing without seeing the purpose.
What follows isn’t a highlight reel. It’s five events, all staged within a single month, that together show the range of what Asian Sports Network can now do: full outside-broadcast production at a world-class surf contest, technically demanding multi-court coverage at an international padel event, and a lean, subscriber-supported model that lets grassroots events reach a real audience. All of it live on AsianSports.com and the AsianSports TV app.
The Rip Curl Cup is Indonesia’s most iconic surf contest, and in 2026 it became the first edition in the event’s history to be broadcast entirely by an Indonesian crew. 9 people across camera, audio, graphics, directing and engineering, all local, all working out of an OB truck parked above one of the most photographed waves in the world.
The production ambition matched the wave. A boat positioned in the channel gave us an angle no beach camera can, and putting a wireless microphone in that boat meant the commentary came from inside the action rather than from a scaffold on the sand. On the beach, a big screen and a full audio feed turned the contest into a live event for the crowd, not just for the stream.
The less visible work was the graphics. The Rip Curl Cup doesn’t run on a standard heat-by-heat format, and for years the on-screen leaderboard has struggled to explain it. We spent a month before the event building a graphic system that translates the Cup’s unique structure into something a surf fan can read at a glance, without knowing the rulebook.
The reaction was telling. A handful of comments during the early rounds said the leaderboard was confusing. Read them closely and it was the opposite problem. Viewers had spent years mentally decoding the old presentation, and when the graphics finally matched what was actually happening in the contest, some of them had to unlearn the workaround. For the first time, the leaderboard simply meant what it said.
FIP Silver Bali is the biggest padel event Indonesia has ever hosted, and it arrived on our desk late, with a modest budget and a very large ask. Ten courts. Every court with live score graphics and commercial inserts. Every court going out to its own dedicated YouTube stream. Across two venues.
Four courts is easy. Eight is doable. Ten courts across two locations, each with its own scoring, its own sponsor rotation and its own stream, had never been done. Not by us, and as far as we know, not by anyone in the region.
The event was hosted by Island Sports Club, a partner we’ve worked with since the day they opened. Staging an international federation event for the first time is an enormous undertaking, and ISC backed us at every step of what was, on paper, an unreasonable ask.
The answer to the ten-court problem was ASN Glasswall, our multi-court broadcast system: one small team can monitor, score and brand several courts at once from a single control point, with each court routed out to its own live stream. It’s what let ten courts across two venues each get their own scored, sponsor-branded feed without needing ten separate production crews.
Glasswall carried the qualifying and main draw. For the Finals, we switched modes entirely: a full ASN broadcast, multi-camera, with world-class commentary. Two very different products from the same event, built for two very different moments.
Some would argue the NOX Cup Bali final was as big an occasion as the FIP Silver final, and on atmosphere alone it’s a fair argument. The event opened with a Balinese ceremonial procession before a crowd that, like Bali itself in 2026, was a mix of local families and the international community that now lives among them. It was a fitting picture of what padel on the island has become.
NOX Cup is also where one of our most important pieces of technology was born. We began developing ASN Overtime during the May edition of the tournament. By August it had grown into something much larger than a scoreboard.
Overtime now handles broadcast score graphics, live statistics and sponsor placements, but it also does the scoring and stat-keeping itself, so the numbers on screen are the official numbers, not a copy of them. It offers a spectator view for anyone at the venue or watching remotely, and it keeps a historical record of every match played on the system.
Not every event has an OB truck budget, and not every event should. ASN+ is our answer to that: a package that lets an organiser broadcast their event at a fraction of the cost of a full production, and in return puts it in front of a growing, paying community of ASN+ subscribers who’ve signed up specifically to watch this kind of sport.
Uluwatu gave us two clean test cases, a couple of weeks apart at the same break.
The Uluwatu Boardriders Challenge was the model working exactly as intended: a local contest, a lean crew, a live stream to an audience that was already there waiting for it.
The Uluwatu Single Fin Festival was, on the surface, almost a carbon copy, same wave and same setup, but with the extra buzz that Project Black brings to anything it touches. And it produced the most useful data we’ve had on the model so far. On Day 1, the ASN+ stream outperformed what the event would likely have reached on its own channel, backing up the case that for most contest days, the subscriber audience is the smarter bet. On Finals Day, with pumping surf and a much wider public appetite, the open stream edged past the ASN+ numbers.
That’s an honest result, and we’d rather share it than pretend otherwise. ASN+ isn’t the right choice for every moment. It’s the right choice for the many days of an event that don’t make headlines, and it means an organiser can afford to cover those days at all.
THE NUMBERS TOLD AN INTERESTING STORY.
| DAY 1 | FINALS DAY | |
|---|---|---|
|
ASN+ |
3496 |
4100 |
|
Open Stream |
2800 |
8700 |
Five events, three very different production tiers, and three pieces of in-house technology that didn’t exist in their current form a year ago: the Rip Curl graphics system, Glasswall and Overtime. Every one of them was tested live, in front of a paying crowd or a watching audience, with no second take.
All of it was available live on AsianSports.com and through the AsianSports TV app on smart TVs, where a growing share of our audience now watches.
EVENTS PRODUCED
LIVE HOURS
TOTAL VIEWS
COUNTRIES WATCHING
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