Stop & Go’s new OB4 truck is capable of supporting 16 cameras and three EVS machines, it too features an SSL System T S400 console at the centre of its audio room, Genelec monitoring and RTS and Riedel intercoms, and its design is a step change for the growing French company

As remote production continues to reshape live broadcasting, French OB specialist Stop & Go Production is rethinking its connectivity with hybrid truck designs, centralised workflows and a commitment to sustainability. Technical director Thomas Mutos reveals how the company’s latest OB units – one traditional, one not so much – are keeping pace with its customers changing needs.

All across Europe, outside broadcast companies are reassessing their workflows to incorporate more and more remote production. It has led to the build of more remote operation centres (ROCs), clever connectivity with fully redundant routes, and it is increasingly changing what our perception of outside broadcast trucks look like.

These shifts are not reducing the number of remote facilities on the road; far from it. But they are challenging our notion of what a remote truck is.

These days remote trucks no longer operate as standalone production units. These days broadcasters demand much more flexibility and their trucks are more likely to be part of their extended network.

In the last few months there have been announcements from the likes of Gravity Media and NEP UK about remote units that are designed to tap into remote infrastructures, but it’s not just these industry giants that recognise this potential.

Stop & Go Production was established in 2010. Mutos’ role is to design and integrate the technical infrastructure of Stop & Go’s fleet of OB trucks and, he says, “guide our clients towards solutions that fit both their business model and their operational needs”.

The company’s evolution over the last 15 years has increasingly focused on more premium productions and reducing the company’s environmental impact. This year it continued its growth with a client base encompassing a range of content from endurance racing to rugby to handball, and includes content providers like beIN Sports and Canal+. And this year Mutos presided over the design and commissioning of two very different OB trucks.

Audio engineer Romain Mouret in Stop & Go’s OB4 on its debut for Top 14 Rugby

Double top

Commissioned in April, OB6 is a traditional OB unit with 24 cameras and five EVS’, with a SSL System T S400 console, full Genelec monitoring, and RTS and Riedel intercoms powering the audio.

“OB6 was completely refurbished at the start of 2025,” says Mutos. “It features a full-size 48-fader SSL System T audio desk to give us a larger control surface and is custom-designed for high capacity productions and premium events. Its layout allows for more space and a bigger technical setup.”

Meanwhile, launched in September 2025 having made its live debut providing coverage of the French Top 14 Rugby League for Canal+, OB4 is quite different. Although it shares a lot of the same audio equipment as OB6, OB4’s technical setup and design priorities are tailored to completely different production needs. Capable of supporting 16 cameras and three EVS machines, it too features an SSL System T S400 console at the centre of its audio room, Genelec monitoring and RTS and Riedel intercoms, but its design is a step change for the growing French company.

“This project is very important to us as it represents a major step forward in how we approach live production,” says Mutos. “Our approach was to design a two-storey control room which improves operational efficiency, power, and flexibility. The ground level caters for storage and field equipment prep, with an option to carry a generator with automatic switchover for full redundancy.

“The upper level houses a full control room equipped with four expanding sides and one vertical slide-out which provides two metres of ceiling height. Housing everything in one single unit lowers maintenance and transport costs, which also halves our ecological and carbon impact, and it enables us to optimise our workspaces, despite having a smaller physical footprint.

“But crucially, it is also our very first hybrid truck, capable of operating fully autonomously or being entirely remote controlled. This dual capability allows us to reduce production costs by limiting team travel and centralising resources, while also lowering our environmental impact. Using a single truck for both workflows is a key part of this strategy.”

The System T console inside Stop & Go’s OB4

Environmental policy

Mutos says that Stop and Go’s focus on sustainability and reducing its carbon footprint is aligned with the preferences of its clients in the French market, and that reducing the environmental impact of live broadcast is important both for the company’s values and for meeting client expectations.

“Clients are increasingly seeking partners who can demonstrate a commitment to reducing their carbon footprint,” he says. “In fact, in France, we have a penalty for companies that negatively impact the environment, and it’s important for us all to work towards reducing this impact.”

Mutos is referring to the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) that came into effect on 1 January 2024. In France, the bill is especially punitive; the French government was the first member state to implement the law, and infringements can attract fines of up to €75,000 and up to five years imprisonment. It’s no wonder that French broadcasters and technology partners have the environment front of mind.

“We started by rethinking the networking of our entire fleet, to make resource sharing between trucks easier,” he says. “When we started looking at new technologies and more robust connectivity, we realised that if we can do this locally, we can also do it remotely.”

Stop & Go operates a nodal hub with remote production control room at its headquarters in Toulouse and is currently constructing a brand-new ROC to develop its remote capabilities and which is due for completion in early 2026. The remote centre infrastructure is based on fully redundant cloud servers at the core of the network, and a global VPN connecting the company’s OB trucks. Like with all remote and distributed production systems, latency is managed, but Stop & Go realised from the outset that there are big differences between video, control and audio latencies, and audio needs to be treated very differently.

“We have deployed a remote-control system which enables any of our connected trucks to be updated or operated remotely,” says Muton. “Our vision for remote production is to keep the source signals at our venues at maximum quality, and we only send the multiviews and remote controls to our remote operation centre in Toulouse.

“The system is very efficient and gives us a control latency of 30 milliseconds for events in France, and 40 milliseconds across the rest of Europe. Meanwhile, video latency for multiviewers is about 100 milliseconds.

“We can operate a 16 camera OB truck with four multiviewers, audio, and intercom, across 50Mbps bandwidth and with very low latency by using a combination of fibre, 5G, and Starlink. We reduce the bandwidth of the video signals to enable us to remote control the production from the ROC, but to maintain our high standard of coverage we feel it is vital to keep the audio signal uncompressed; for this reason, the audio signal always stays onsite at the venue.

“It is a good solution for us as it means that we can maintain live direction between the director in the remote production centre and the team on the ground at the venue; although we have 100ms delay on the multiviewer at the ROC, we have real time communication on the audio, so we are working in the same environment as we would be if we were in the truck.” Keeping audio at the venue also minimises latency for IEMs.

While none of Stop & Go’s trucks are fully IP, all the audio is, and Dante keeps everything simple

Keeping it consistent

Despite the differences in approach between OB4 and OB6, Mutos says the decision to standardise equipment across both was intentional, and SSL’s Dante based routing and I/O system made it an easy sell. For while none of Stop & Go’s trucks are fully IP, all the audio is, and Dante keeps everything simple.

“Our goal was always to standardise the architecture so our teams can switch from one truck to another without additional training, and we chose to work with innovative broadcast manufacturers that match that vision,” he says.

“All the audio in Stop & Go’s trucks is IP and is based on Dante, but we have not made the switch to IP on the video side because at the moment it is still simpler to deploy video SDI. On the audio side, the System T is built around Dante which works well for us because it is very simple to set up and operate. We’ve been working with Dante for many years; it is a technology we know inside out. Combined with SSL’s powerful control surfaces, it’s total integration with Dante makes setup very quick and easy.”

Each truck’s audio desk layout is also designed to be as flexible as possible. The 48 fader surface in OB6 is split into two separate sections for redundancy, while OB4 also has two control surfaces, with a System T S400 twin bay next to a standalone System T Fader Tile. Mutos says the Fader Tile can act as a physical redundancy, can be adopted for remote operation use, and also enables Stop & Go to work in dual-operator mode.

“It’s crucial to have redundancy, but because we don’t have a lot of space in the audio room, this setup means we can do a lot in a very compact footprint,” he says. “Sometimes we need to have two mixers for home and international mixes, sometimes we might need a sub mixer, and this gives us the space to do both.”