Guide25 May 2026

Can You Broadcast From a Site With No Infrastructure or Power?

A field with no line, no cabinet and no mains is a normal starting point for us rather than a reason the broadcast cannot happen. Here is how it actually works.

Daniel Wilkinson

Founder and Operations Director, dwmedia

The short answer is yes

Most of the sites we work on have nothing. A field, a car park, a clifftop, a marquee on a school playing field. No fibre in the ground, no cabinet within half a mile, and power that arrives on the back of a lorry the same morning we do. That is a normal starting point for live production, not an obstacle.

What it does mean is that connectivity and power stop being someone else’s problem and become part of the production plan. If nobody has thought about them until the week of the event, that is when a broadcast quietly becomes impossible.

Connectivity without a line

Where a venue has a dedicated, tested line we will use it, and on a stadium or arena job it is often the best path available. What we will not do is put a broadcast on shared guest WiFi, and we never turn up assuming a line exists.

So bonded 4G and 5G across multiple carriers travels with us to every job, along with Starlink. Bonding matters more than raw speed: multiple networks carrying the same stream at once means a single carrier degrading in a field full of ten thousand phones is a shrug rather than an outage. Starlink covers the sites where cellular genuinely is not there, which in the UK is usually a valley, a coastline or a very rural estate.

Two practical points worth knowing before you plan a site:

Cellular capacity collapses when the audience arrives, not when you test it. A site survey at 9am with nobody there tells you very little about 8pm.
Satellite needs a clear view of the sky. Under a tree canopy, inside a steel-framed marquee or against a tall stand, the position matters as much as the hardware.

Power on a site with no mains

Broadcast kit does not draw much power compared with lighting or sound, but it is unusually fussy about the quality of it. A generator shared with a lighting rig will brown out when a large fixture strikes, and a dip that a lamp shrugs off can reset an encoder mid-show.

Which is why we ask about power at the same time as cameras. What we look for is a clean supply, ideally from a distro that is not carrying the whole stage, and UPS protection on the gallery so a momentary dip does not take the broadcast off air. On smaller jobs we can run self-contained on batteries for the length of an event.

What we need to know in advance

Almost all of the difficulty on a bare site is solvable if it is raised early. What is not solvable is finding out on the morning that the only power available is a domestic socket in a portacabin sixty metres away.

Where the production position can sit, and whether a vehicle can get to it
What power is coming to site, who is providing it, and what else is on the same distro
Whether there is any existing line, and if so whether it is dedicated or shared
What the site looks like when the audience is in, not when it is empty
Cable routes, and who else needs to run cable through the same gap

When the honest answer is no

There are sites where a live broadcast is not the right call. Deep valleys with no cellular and no sky view, or an event where the only power available cannot support a gallery safely. In those cases recording is usually the better answer: you get the coverage and the archive without betting the event on a link that might not hold.

We would rather tell you that on the call than take the booking and hope.

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