What do the Winter Games Have in Common with a Roulette Table?

At first glance, producing coverage of one of the world’s biggest sporting events and running a live roulette game might not appear to have much in common. Technically, however, the similarities are greater than you might think.

Both depend on live video where timing really matters. Both need technology that can operate reliably around the clock, cope with large audiences and deliver an experience where what one viewer sees is consistent with what everyone else sees.

And in both environments, low latency alone is not enough.

Latency needs to be controlled. It needs to be adjustable depending on the application, and crucially, it needs to remain synchronised across viewers. In live casino, where potentially thousands of players can be watching the same physical event, seeing the same outcome at the same time is fundamental. The same principle applies in broadcast, where production teams and audiences need confidence that the live experience is exactly that: live.

This is one reason we see significant potential in Media over QUIC (MoQ). MoQ is an emerging IETF standard built on QUIC for real-time media transport, designed to support low-latency, scalable delivery while handling the realities of modern networks more efficiently. Vindral has been building with MoQ since 2023 and is a member of the OpenMOQ Software Consortium. Vindral Live already supports MoQ across the delivery chain, and we have been gradually deploying it in production, alongside the established protocols broadcasters and gaming companies depend on today.

But streaming is only part of the crossover.

When live production moves into software

Broadcast has been steadily moving away from production chains built around large quantities of dedicated hardware. Increasingly, functions that once required separate systems can be brought together in software. And live casino is heading in the same direction.

Part of that is economic. Hardware has become increasingly expensive, while the physical footprint and operational overhead associated with traditional server rooms can be significant. But the more interesting change is what becomes possible once production moves into software.

Vindral Composer is a good example. Video and audio compositing, chroma keying, graphics, encoding and other core studio functions can sit within the same software environment. In live casino, those capabilities also extend into areas such as multi-branding and computer vision through Vindral’s V-Track suite of products.

That means the conversation is no longer only about replacing a piece of hardware with software. It is about giving production teams far greater scope to create around the physical studio without continually adding physical infrastructure.

We are already seeing that in live casino, where the same underlying studio or physical game can support very different visual environments and player experiences.

A very different test in Milano Cortina

Earlier this year, we had the opportunity to put that software-defined approach to work in a very different environment.

Vindral Composer and Vindral Live formed part of Swedish public broadcaster SVT’s remote production workflow for the Winter Games in Milano Cortina. Composer was used within SVT’s software-defined production chain in Sweden, processing video and audio arriving from Italy, while Vindral Live supported transport, monitoring and delivery across the workflow. For us, this was a major test.

Although Vindral has its roots in broadcast and live video, our platform had not previously been used in a broadcast production context like this. The scale was significant, the audience was enormous and, ultimately, failure was not an option. There were countless hours of work behind the scenes to make it happen, but it worked.

What was particularly interesting was how familiar many of the technical demands felt.

Reliability, synchronisation, low latency, precise control over video and audio, and the ability to operate efficiently without an enormous hardware footprint are all things we have spent years dealing with in live casino. In that sense, the technology transfer has come full circle.

When we first entered live casino in 2013, our background in broadcast and live video shaped the way we approached the sector. More than a decade later, the experience gained from running demanding live casino environments is helping us solve problems for broadcasters such as SVT. Each industry has made us better at serving the other.

What quality looks like to the player

For the player, none of this should feel particularly technical. In fact, the best result is often that they do not notice the technology at all. That is where broadcast-grade synchronisation becomes particularly important as live casino adds more digital elements around physical games.

Creedroomz’s recently launched Inferno Roulette is a good example. The game uses Vindral’s V-Track Roulette technology to follow the movement of a real physical roulette wheel in real time and keep digital multiplier graphics precisely aligned with it as the wheel spins.

If that synchronisation is even slightly wrong, the illusion breaks. When it is right, the digital and physical elements feel like one experience. That, for us, is what quality means in practice.

The same principle will extend into other physical formats. We are now eagerly awaiting the first game show powered by V-Track Money Wheel, which we expect to see launched during the first half of 2027.

Learning in both directions

Vindral’s recognition with a 2026 Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award has naturally brought our broadcast work into sharper focus. The standards in high-end broadcasting are incredibly demanding, particularly around reliability, quality and workflow. And there is plenty that live casino can learn from that discipline.

But I do not think this is a one-way exchange.

Live casino has spent years solving its own complex real-time problems, often at substantial scale and in environments that need to operate continuously. Those lessons can increasingly feed back into broadcasting, particularly as smaller and mid-sized broadcasters look for ways to achieve high production standards without the hardware footprint and cost structures traditionally associated with major live productions.

As both sectors become more software-defined, that crossover will only become more interesting.

A Winter Games broadcast and a roulette table might look worlds apart. Underneath, many of the problems are remarkably similar. And increasingly, so are the technologies being used to solve them.