Lichess Broadcast Updates

A new design

Chess events were first broadcast on Lichess in 2018, but the broadcast page design hasn't changed much since then. Having a list of broadcasts worked well when only a few events were featured, but now the Lichess broadcast team has grown significantly, as has the number of published broadcasts - currently we have around 30 active official broadcasts. This means it can be harder to find the event you're looking for, especially if it's a lower-profile event.

The broadcast team tries to ensure that every chess event featuring electronic boards is broadcast on Lichess. So if you're an organiser who wants your event to be broadcast, please contact us at broadcast@lichess.org.

For what it's worth, any Lichess user can create their own broadcasts using lichess.org/broadcast/new.

In recent weeks, our developers and broadcast team have been working on various improvements to the way we handle and show broadcasts, including a new design for the broadcast page, which went live a few weeks ago. Events are still categorised based on a tier system, but broadcasts are now laid out on the page in a grid format (rather than list) and each one now has a title image to make it easier to recognise, while adding a splash of colour to the site. The overview page now shows the current number of viewers for each broadcast too.

The appearance of individual broadcasts has also been revised. There are now four tabs:

• Overview - a description of the event,
• Games - an overview of the top boards (with pagination and search)
• Schedule - a list of rounds in the event (and when they begin)
• Standings - the current event standings, based on the games included in the broadcast source (currently only available for round-robin events)

You can take a look at those here!

Broadcast groups

Many tournaments have multiple sections, typically divided by rating. Previously, we had to create and link multiple broadcasts to fully separate each section. This process was hard to follow and it often led to viewers not being able to find broadcasts of other sections in the same event. But now all that has changed, as our developers have implemented a new feature that allows the broadcast team to create "broadcast groups".

Better support for team tournaments

Some of the most prestigious and popular events in chess are team tournaments - think of the FIDE Olympiad, the European Team Championships, the German Bundesliga (and many more). Previously, these were quite hard to follow on Lichess as they were presented as if they were individual events. Viewers had to consult other websites just to check which players belonged to which teams! But as team tournament broadcasts were always well received by the community, we considered this a priority for our broadcast improvement work, and as a result Lichess now provides much better support for following team tournaments!

As PGNs often do not include team names, now one can easily assign players to teams in the broadcast description.

Subscribe to broadcasts!

Users can now get a notification every time a new round in an event starts, because broadcasts now have “subscribe” buttons! So now you can follow events that interest you (in a similar way to following streamers on lichess.org/streamer).

A personal list of subscribed broadcasts gives users an overview of all the broadcasts to which they are subscribed.

Highlight broadcast creators in chat

Messages by contributors are now highlighted in event broadcast chats, which allows contributors to provide quick and highly visible updates to all broadcast viewers.

URLs in Broadcasts

In the past, we had broadcast URLs and specific round URLs, and sharing a specific game with someone meant one had to share the round URL and then search for the correct board number to find the game. But now each game has its own URL, which makes it much easier to share games with others. The broadcast, round and game URLs can be accessed in the "share" tab under each board:

The previously mentioned broadcast tabs (Overview, Games, Schedule and Standings) also have their own URLs, which can be accessed via the browser search bar.

Improvements behind the scenes

Custom broadcast homepage spotlights

The broadcast team is now able to create custom homepage spotlights to promote broadcasts, which allow for custom round descriptions. They can also be region-specific.

Delay in broadcasts

We see more and more organisers requesting delay for their event broadcasts as an anti-cheating measure. So now this feature has been implemented natively in Lila, allowing anyone to easily delay moves.

Player information enhancement

To further improve the user experience in broadcasts, a few months ago the broadcast team started to manually add players' names to broadcasts that only contained the player names in the PGN file (without titles and ratings) using the "Replacement" function. Over time this process became more laborious, so we've simplified it even more by linking players with their FIDE IDs (eg from PGN files where it's provided), and automatically retrieving and adding players' current titles and ratings, using FIDE's database.

Clone broadcasts

The broadcast team is now able to clone event broadcasts to be more efficient when creating multiple broadcasts for a tournament with multiple sections.

Contributing

For anyone interested in learning more about Lichess broadcasts - you can create your own broadcasts here and find help here. We're also always happy to welcome new volunteers to the Lichess broadcast team!