Some projects feel monumental from the moment the first phone call comes in. When BCE, the host broadcaster appointed to coordinate the national coverage, asked us to take on the technical realization of Luxembourg’s 2025 succession weekend, I knew immediately this would be unlike anything we had done in the country before. RTL Luxembourg committed to airing the entire weekend live, and the expectations were high, not only because of the importance of the event, but because transitions of power here are so rare that almost no one gets a second chance to refine the process.
Working in Luxembourg always feels a bit personal for me. I grew up here, I speak the language, and I still remember my role as a young vision technician during the previous succession twenty-five years ago. Standing now on the other side of the glass, responsible for the full technical architecture, gave this project a very particular weight.
Building a City-Wide Remote Production
The planning started about two and a half months before the ceremony. Since the productions we do in Luxembourg often exceed the capacity of local OB units, Skyline is regularly called in when things grow bigger than usual – national football matches, state visits, the Pope’s visit in 2024. But even with that history, this was on another scale entirely.
The core concept was a distributed, fully remote production linking twelve locations across and around Luxembourg City directly to our OB7. OB11 supported one of the larger secondary sites, and four additional Skyline OB trucks were positioned across the country. None of those trucks operated as independent control rooms; they acted essentially as large stageboxes. All video routing, shading, sound mixing, tally, intercom, and decision-making flowed back to the city hub.
That required a network infrastructure that behaved like a single production facility stretched across a country. We deployed around thirty-eight kilometers of fiber, mapped, labeled, and redundantly routed. In Luxembourg’s medieval centre that meant planning cable paths with near surgical precision. Some streets cannot be opened, some facades cannot be touched, and public life must remain functional even on a historic weekend. BCE added another critical safety net with Aviwest 5G links to secure our most vulnerable routes.
For signal transport we relied on Makito X4 encoding units and our own TV Skyline Connect system. Several locations were linked to OB7 and OB11 through Layer-2 tunnels, which allowed us to transport not only images and sound but also intercom, tally, return feeds and control data with complete transparency. At peak times, more than forty-five live cameras and over one hundred audio sources were traveling through that network at once.
Grass Valley equipment formed the backbone of the main production. We deployed a large mix of LDX 150s, LDX 135s, remote block cameras, and several compact systems in places where a traditional camera simply wouldn’t fit. Sixteen wireless cameras, all running Grass Valley heads paired with Domo transmitters, gave us the mobility needed for processions and arrivals. Inside OB7, a Grass Valley Kahuna switcher handled the entire multi-site workflow without a single major hiccup.
Three Days of Live Complexity
The ceremony itself stretched over three days, and from a technical standpoint, each day had its own personality. The palace, parliament, city hall, Celle Cité, the red carpet area, and several reception venues were all active on the first day. Saturday expanded the footprint with locations outside the city, including Grevenmacher, Wiltz, Steinfort and Dudelange, as well as two evening shows. Sunday concluded with the cathedral service, which demanded a quieter but equally precise approach.
Even with more than a hundred live sources feeding into the system, what mattered most was coherence, maintaining a visual and narrative continuity across events that varied drastically in scale, acoustics, and geography. From the director’s seat, the whole country had to feel like a single controlled environment, even though it was in reality twelve small worlds connected by kilometers of fiber.
The team carried the weight of that responsibility. Mika managed the OB7 floor with complete calm, Stefan kept audio balanced across wildly different acoustic environments, and Julian maintained the anchor of our production planning. Alexander, Johannes, Peter, Franziska, and many others ensured that every remote location behaved like an extension of our main facility. Without that consistency, none of the technical architecture would have held together the way it did.
What Stayed With Me
On the morning of the succession, when the first camera chains lit up and the return feeds stabilized, I felt something I rarely feel on large projects: a moment of quiet pride. Not because of the scale – though it was the largest broadcast Luxembourg has ever had – but because everything we had planned so intensely was finally breathing.
For TV Skyline, this project was a technical milestone. For BCE, it was a masterclass in coordination. For RTL, it was a historic weekend of uninterrupted national coverage. For Grass Valley, it was a showcase of what their ecosystem can support when pushed to its limits.
And for me, as someone who witnessed the last succession from inside a small OB van twenty-five years ago, closing this circle meant more than I expected. Technology evolves, workflows evolve, but the feeling of being part of a once-in-a-generation broadcast remains exactly the same.
