ARRI, 12 Points – How Eurovision 2026 Was Shot on 24 ALEXA 35 Live Cameras

by Nino LeitnerJune 2^nd, 2026

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For the first time, the Eurovision Song Contest was shot entirely on cinema cameras, and as part of our ARRI x CineD Media Cooperation at Eurovision, I spent more than six weeks on and off embedded with the ARRI crew to document how it happened. Our new behind-the-scenes film follows 24 ARRI ALEXA 35 Live systems from hand-built blocks of aluminum and titanium in Munich to the grand finale in Vienna, watched by roughly 180 million people. It is a story of a company that owns cinema proving itself in a broadcast world it hasn’t belonged to in the past.

ARRI has defined how movies look for more than a century. The vast majority of Oscar-winning films are shot on ALEXA, and if you have watched anything in a theater, you have almost certainly watched something captured on an ARRI sensor. Live television, though, has always been a separate universe with its own cameras, workflows, and unwritten rules, dominated for decades by Grass Valley and Sony systems built for speed and reliability rather than cinematic image quality. The question that drives our documentary is a simple one: what if live TV could look like cinema?

For the 2026 contest, hosted by ORF at the Wiener Stadthalle in Vienna, the answer arrived in the form of 24 ALEXA 35 Live cameras capturing every position across the show. It also happened on our doorstep, since CineD is headquartered in Vienna, which made being on site throughout the build-up and the shows far more practical for us. We covered the deployment as it began in our first report from the ground, and this documentary is the full picture: what got ARRI into the room, what went right, and what very nearly went wrong. I spent most of those six weeks alongside the ARRI team, in particular Technical Product Specialist Thomas Stoschek and Product Manager Camera Systems Jannik Abelt, and one thing was obvious from the first day: the excitement and involvement from ARRI’s staff was palpable throughout. As Thomas puts it early on, “here you have 24 different cameras, and that is what people never expect from ARRI, that we can do this different kind of solutions.”

Why a cinema company chased a broadcast show

ARRI dominates cinema but has had effectively very little presence in live broadcast in the past, a market it is now entering seriously with the ALEXA 35 Live. The Eurovision Song Contest, the longest-running and most-watched live music competition in the world, is about the most demanding proving ground imaginable. The 2026 edition marked the 70th anniversary of a contest first held in 1956, and Austria, one of the founding nations, staged a show that regularly draws 150 to 180 million viewers worldwide. If the system could survive Eurovision, it could survive anything.

Sean Dooley of ARRI frames the bigger shift in our film. “I think we’re definitely seeing a general trend where in the past we’ve had a parallel kind of stream, where we’ve had broadcast technology and we’ve had motion picture or cinematic technology operating in two different worlds. But we’re definitely seeing a trend of that coming together.” He admits the introduction was not frictionless: “introducing a new camera system, initially, having a bit of hesitation,” before the operators and OB truck crews started, in his words, “being amazed at the image quality differences.” Host broadcaster ORF, aware of the challenge, chose to chart new territory, with Head of Directors Michael Kögler wanting to give the Song Contest a genuinely cinematographic look.

Hand-built in Munich, integrated into a truck built for something else

Roughly six weeks before the first broadcast, the real work began in Munich. Like any ALEXA, the ALEXA 35 Live cameras are hand-built at ARRI’s headquarters, literally starting from milled blocks of aluminum and titanium with the sensor and electronics fitted on site. In parallel, ARRI’s Vienna branch built and tested the LPS-1 (Live Production System) units, the fiber camera adapters that bring familiar broadcast controls to the camera. “We are a German Central European company,” ARRI Managing Director David Bermbach says. “All the cameras and everything we use here is produced just four hours by train away in Munich. We even have offices in Vienna. It’s really like a home run for us.”

The integration into NEP’s OB van was, in practical terms, a first. Eight CCUs were integrated into a truck built natively for Grass Valley broadcast cameras, with all the special cameras (cable cams, cranes, wireless rigs) connected through Riedel’s MediorNet infrastructure. The only hardware conversion required was a small interface adapter handling intercom and tally protocols; everything else came down to signal routing, intercom paths, and tele-return. Inside the truck, around six to eight cameras sit with each shader, all matched together on monitors in what ARRI describes as coordinated chaos.

The shader is king

In broadcast, if the shading tools do not feel right, the entire production falls apart. This was the moment of truth, and it is where NEP Engineer-in-Charge Erhard Thüringer, the most important independent voice in our film, becomes decisive. A veteran broadcast engineer who runs OB vehicles on productions across Europe, Thüringer had no skepticism when told the whole show would run on ARRI. He describes the shading of the ALEXA 35 Live as completely identical to standard broadcast cameras, offering the same comfort level his engineers already know, and he was surprised by how much development ARRI had already completed in both software and hardware. His verdict carries weight precisely because he answers to neither ARRI nor to us: “if I had to choose cameras for this production myself, I would also choose the ARRI cameras.”

There is a commercial sting in his assessment too. Thüringer notes a price difference of approximately €30,000 per unit between ARRI and traditional broadcast systems, calling it a significant factor, even though – as we will see later – the difference can definitely be seen on screen. The technology convinced the skeptics; the price tag is the part still being negotiated.

A larger sensor changes what live TV can show

The advantages on screen came down to physics. The Super 35 sensor is significantly larger than a traditional broadcast sensor, and that difference shows up in ways viewers at home could see. The much higher dynamic range meant no clipping in the highlights even under extreme stage lighting, while the larger sensor eliminated moiré on the bright LED walls, a function of sensor size rather than dynamic range. Skin tones held up under constantly changing colored stage light, and pyrotechnic and fire effects rendered with natural color and detail where standard broadcast cameras lose all detail and accuracy in fire.

Florian Rettich, who handled the custom camera looks, explains the thinking: “there is simply enough dynamic range that we can play with, and we decided to make the fire look as natural as possible, still maintaining a certain brightness.” ORF Head Cameraman Max Meissl, who has operated cameras for 30 years, found that working with the ALEXA 35 Live made hardly any difference from normal broadcast camera operation, though he appreciated being able to sharpen more easily thanks to the shallower depth of field, and he was struck that all 27 deployed camera positions looked matched, “like it comes from one camera.” That consistency is partly down to the cameras matching out of the box on startup because of consistent sensor temperature, which meant less work for the shaders. (Please note that while there were 24 ALEXA 35 Live cameras, 3 additional cameras were deployed, for instance PTZ cameras from other manufacturers).

Shooting 35 music videos, live

The most genuinely new idea ARRI brought to Eurovision was not the camera, but the look pipeline. Rettich and ARRI’s colorist Florian “Utsi” Martin worked with ORF’s lighting designer, director, and shaders to develop a custom look for each competing delegation. “The advantage of having looks in a camera is that you can visualize and change colour behaviour on the fly,” he says. “Think of shooting 35 music videos, but live.” In the end, over 50 looks were used across 35 different songs, with some acts (including the winning Bulgarian entry) carrying multiple look changes inside a single performance.

Crucially, each delegation was offered a selection of looks and invited to fine-tune them to its own creative concept. This required a closer collaboration than broadcast is used to, with the lighting designer and the camera team now shaping the final image together, a new dynamic that took time to settle. Jannik Abelt was candid about the early friction: some on the production side were not confident sharing creative control, telling ARRI that this was not the workflow they were used to. The point that won them over was that, unlike cinema, there is no fixing it later. “It’s not like in cinema where we can create all that in post-production,” Abelt notes. “We need to deliver it in life, and that makes it unique also for us.”

When bugs became features

The look automation tool is the clearest example of ARRI working like it does on a high-end cinema set rather than a certified-months-in-advance broadcast. The first version forwarded looks to all cameras from a single device, but it forced the shader to press multiple buttons during every rehearsal. So he asked for an optimization, and ARRI’s developers built an automated system on site that integrates with LiveEdit, the show’s rundown and automation system, pushing the correct look to every camera at the right timing for each act. To be clear, ARRI’s tool integrates with LiveEdit; it did not replace it. “We haven’t thought about that process in the beginning,” Abelt says. “Now it is real and everything is implemented.”

That on-site iteration extended to the problems, of which there were several honest ones. Watching it unfold up close, I was genuinely amazed by how much ARRI learned about its own products in the venue, and how quickly that knowledge made its way into new firmware versions for the cameras. Network traffic emerged as one of the biggest discoveries: with 24 cameras each sending data, receiving shading parameters, and receiving tallies, the network load was a genuine surprise. A double-tally bug left the light on some wireless cameras stuck on after fast switching, which ARRI’s development team, on standby in Munich throughout, set about fixing during the production. There was a base station date reset issue, and the well-understood B4 lens problem. Most lenses in use were B4 broadcast lenses on an adapter, and as Abelt says plainly, “we lose a lot of light due to the B4 adapter. That’s physics.” The cameras’ sensitivity and dynamic range compensated, with some delegations pushed to ISO 5000 to great effect. This approach, with a development team writing new code and pushing camera updates during rehearsals, is standard for ARRI’s cinema support but essentially unheard of in broadcast.

None of this was an easy position for ARRI to be in. The company was effectively starting from scratch in broadcast, on one of the highest-profile live productions in the world, with no margin for the kind of certified-and-untouched comfort the discipline usually relies on. What carried it through, from what I observed, was that everyone simply gave their very best to leave a great impression, and they did.

The Riedel connection

ARRI’s broadcast ambitions gained considerable weight when the company was acquired by Riedel Communications during the Eurovision build-up, a development we explored further in our NAB 2026 interview with Thomas Riedel. Riedel’s Bolero intercoms and MediorNet infrastructure were already integral to the production, and the personal history runs deep. “Without ARRI, my company probably wouldn’t exist in the way it does exist,” Thomas Riedel says in our film, recalling how ARRI pulled him into intercom work around the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics. The strategic logic is cinema camera technology and broadcast infrastructure under one roof, and the integration challenges encountered at Eurovision (network traffic, signal routing, intercom paths) are exactly the kind of issues a combined ARRI and Riedel ecosystem is positioned to solve from within. Abelt sees the two worlds converging: “I believe both worlds will sort of combine and live under the ARRI umbrella.”

I had a lot of contact with the Riedel staff during the production, and what struck me was how naturally the two companies fit together. Broadcast is genuinely Riedel’s world; they know the Eurovision production inside out, and that familiarity made ARRI’s job considerably easier. There was a clear cultural click between the two, both German companies, with a lot of mutual trust and a real willingness to include each other. I could see in person why this pairing makes sense well beyond the balance sheet.

A broken cable in a mirror box

After two successful broadcasts, the team almost allowed itself to relax during the Grand Final, and then a single fault did what 24 cameras on one network could not. A broken cable on a handheld camera’s wireless transmitter caused a freeze frame during the Czech grand final performance staged inside a mirror box, where there was no alternative camera angle to cut to. It was the kind of fault that, as Abelt notes, can happen on any production carrying this many cameras, and the diagnosis was almost anticlimactic: “in the end it was just a broken cable, and it’s the easiest thing to solve.” A camera-system failure it was not.

For context on where the platform goes next, ARRI has already introduced the ALEXA 35 Xtreme with super slow motion aimed at sports, and Abelt hinted at major developments by 2028, with future targets including sports, concerts, and awards shows. The underlying ALEXA 35 sensor, with its 17 stops of dynamic range, is one we put through our own Lab Test when the camera launched, and the Live multicam system itself was introduced back in 2024.

Personal Impressions

A word on the experience itself. Over those weeks I was treated as if I were a permanent member of the team, and that level of trust mattered more than it might sound. It meant people stopped performing for the camera and simply got on with their work, which is the only way to capture a production honestly. I felt genuinely at home with this crew, and I think that comes through in the film. There are many people to thank for their support on this production, but I want to highlight three names especially: Nina Bayne, Thomas Stoschek and Jannik Abelt. Without their constant support and patience, none of this would have been possible at all.

The documentary runs over 20 minutes and is available now on our YouTube channel and embedded above, published as a collaboration with the ARRI YouTube channel. The full story, including the side-by-side look comparisons between national finals and the Eurovision stage, is best experienced in the film itself.

ARRI has arrived in broadcast, big time. Do you think large-sensor cinema cameras will become the norm for major live events, or will the price gap keep traditional broadcast systems in charge? Let us know in the comments below!

Disclaimer: ARRI at Eurovision 2026 is a sponsored media cooperation between ARRI and CineD with final sign-off of the released content through ARRI, CineD, EBU and ORF.