page_title: Drone Racing League
section_title: Format and broadcasting
hierarchical_section_title: Drone Racing League / Format and broadcasting
caption_attribution_description: The image depicts DRL engineers repairing DRL Racer3 drones.
context_page_description: The Drone Racing League is a professional drone racing league that operates internationally. DRL pilots race first-person view with identical, custom-built drones at speeds above 80 MPH through three-dimensional courses. News publication Quartz described DRL as feeling "like pod-racing from Star Wars" with "hopes [of becoming] the Formula 1, NASCAR and MotoGP of drone racing."
  Founded in 2015 and launched publicly in January 2016, DRL is broadcast on Twitter, NBC, NBC Sports, Sky Sports, ProSiebenSat.1, FOX Sports Asia, Groupe AB, and OSN. Former broadcast partners include ESPN and Disney XD.
  The league is currently in its fourth season, the 2019 DRL Allianz World Championship Season, which features seven races in locations including Allianz Riviera in Nice, France, BMW Welt in Munich, Germany, and The Adventuredome in Las Vegas, Nevada.
  DRL recently launched the Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing Circuit, an autonomous drone racing series. It will invite teams of university students and technologists to design an AI framework capable of flying a drone through DRL courses without human intervention and compete for a chance to win $1mm in prizes.
context_section_description: DRL recruits drone pilots from around the globe to compete on original courses. Two groups of six pilots compete during separate rounds of semifinals, and the fastest three pilots from each group move on to the finals. The semifinals and finals races each include multiple heats that each last about a minute long. Pilots are awarded points based on their placement in each heat and the fastest pilot with the most points at the end wins the race, earning a guaranteed spot in the World Championship finale.
  DRL films all of its races for a broadcast and digital audience. In order to capture racing quadcopters that fly almost 90 MPH, DRL designs and manages the entire drone racing and broadcast ecosystem for its events, including the timing and length of races.
  The DRL media team uses 50 to 60 cameras per event and the drone itself has two cameras: an SD low latency analogue HS1177 600TVL for pilot navigation and a GoPro Session 5 for post-production, both of which operate automatically with no remote controls.
  The races are not broadcast live; they are post-produced for broadcast.
caption: DRL engineers repairing DRL Racer3 drones