Olympic-sized Facilities
We’re working with Olympic Broadcast Services to gather footage for one of our clients who are official partners of London 2012. Once we’d got in, past the razor wire and soldiers with guns, OBS took us on a tour of their facilities inside the Olympic Park the other day. The International Broadcast Centre is staggering.
At 275m long, 104m wide and 21m tall, the building is roughly the same size as two football fields end to end and houses the twenty or so international broadcasters covering the games. NBC has the largest area – housing over 3,000 staff (with bouncers on the doors, for no clear reason).
The master control room is linked to the 1,000 cameras covering the games, with a monitor wall showing live feeds from over 500 of these at once. From here they’ll be broadcasting over 460 hours of continuous programming during the events and over 230 hours of 3D footage.
Apparently the servers at the Beijing Games were only large enough to store 3 days of footage online – so this time they’ve upped the spec and in London they have capacity for 5,600 hours worth of HD footage.
It’s a hugely impressive feat of broadcast engineering….but you can’t help wondering what’s going to happen to it all after the 9th September when the Paralymics ends? What will the building become? And where will all that equipment go?!
