Ralliradio Goes Cloud-Native: How Yle Ran Rally Finland's Live Stream on Open Live

The challenge

Secto Rally Finland is one of the loudest weekends on the WRC calendar, and for Finnish audiences Ralliradio is how it gets covered on Yle Areena — a live studio show weaving together camera coverage, real-time stage positions and running commentary from Radio Suomi.

It is exactly the kind of production that punishes a rigid broadcast chain: sources change minute to minute, and the operator has to keep up with a live rally, not a rehearsed running order.

Yle's production services team (Tuotantopalvelut) used this year's coverage as a test bed for something they had been evaluating for a while — how far a live web broadcast can go running entirely in the cloud, entirely in the browser, with no dedicated on-prem hardware.

The solution

The tool was Open Live, running on Eyevinn Open Source Cloud (OSC). Open Live's backend and Open Live Studio's browser-based mixing interface ran on cloud infrastructure in Sweden. The one piece of the pipeline with real appetite for compute — video rendering — ran on a GPU instance in Frankfurt instead, with the two regions working together as one production system.

That split is the whole point of building a vision mixer as cloud-native software rather than a rack of hardware: each part of the pipeline goes where it makes sense, not where the hardware happens to live. On top of Open Live, three instances of SPX Graphics Controller handled the on-screen graphics — presenter name straps, background graphics, and the WhatsApp contact details Ralliradio uses to bring listeners into the show.

The production setup

Yle ran a dedicated "Ralliradio 2026" configuration. Sources came in over both SRT and HTML — a studio camera feed, a live WRC map page and an image carousel — mixed into three picture-in-picture layouts.

• 1080p at 50fps, 8 Mbps output.
• SRT and HTML sources ingested into the same production.
• Three SPX Graphics Controller instances for real-time on-screen graphics.
• PiP 1 — the studio camera, with SPX graphics laid over the top for presenter straps.
• PiP 2 — the WRC map, with real-time text overlays tracking stage positions.
• PiP 3 — the image carousel, pre-cropped to fill its frame cleanly, no straps needed.
• Live switching from a Stream Deck — the vision mixer operator drove PiP views and sources in step with the rally itself rather than a fixed running order.

A dedicated path for audio

Several of the sources were live HTML pages, where the audio is embedded in the page itself. Rather than mixing it in-page, Yle gave audio its own dedicated path: audio from Radio Suomi and the map material was combined in vMix and routed back into Open Live as the main, high-quality audio feed, while the studio camera's embedded audio ran in parallel as an independent backup. Levels and monitoring were controlled directly from Open Live Studio's mixer view.

It is a good illustration of how cloud production gets assembled in practice — Open Live does not demand an all-or-nothing switch, and slots into existing toolchains where each component resides optimally.

The results

The result was a complete live production — multi-source video over SRT and HTML, real-time graphics, layered audio with an independent backup path — mixed entirely from a browser, on cloud infrastructure spanning two regions, with no dedicated on-prem hardware.

The conclusion after the production is that cloud-based Open Live performed well in a show as dynamic as Ralliradio.

"Fully browser-based production is not a future concept but a working setup, flexible, cost-effective, and ready for demanding live formats."

Read the engineering story

We wrote up the full production in detail — the two-region setup, the graphics and PiP layouts, and the dedicated audio path.

Read Ralliradio Goes Cloud-Native on Medium →

More on the platform behind it: Open Live →