Live from the World Cup: Gearhouse Broadcast Delivers

Gearhouse Broadcast has a pretty big presence at the World Cup as it has supplied not only technical operations centers (TOCs) at each of the 12 venues for HBS but also equipment for ESPN, ITV, and DirecTV Latin America which serves viewers in Mexico, Uruguay and, most importantly now, Argentina.

Kevin Moorhouse, Gearhouse Broadcast, COO, inside the technical operations center (TOC) at Maracana Stadium.

“Everyone is really happy so far,” says Kevin Moorhouse, Gearhouse Broadcast, COO who was at Maracana Stadium for the France-Germany match on July 4. “In the beginning there were a few issues with delivery and power but eventually everything was delivered as requested and we had enough days in the IBC to catch up with the power issues.”

HBS shipped off plenty of kit from the UK, including the 12 two-foot TOC containers as well as four 40-foot containers and then an additional 20 tons of equipment that was sent via air freight.

“For big events where you are in a location for three or six weeks flypacks make sense and are a better solution than trucks because you can’t get the size of the production galleries you have here inside a truck,” he adds.

With respect to ITV, Gearhouse Broadcast was commissioned to deliver additional facilities in the International Broadcast Center (IBC), including production office, master control room and transmission gallery. ITV has also commissioned a studio located on the iconic Copacabana beach and full talkback capability between the two sites.

To support ITV’s production requirements, Gearhouse Broadcast has supplied and installed a range of equipment, including EVS XT3 servers and IPDirector production asset management suite for ingest and logging, Avid Media Composer, Interplay and ISIS shared media storage system, Snell routers, Imagine Communications glue products, Sony cameras and Riedel talkback systems.

As the World Cup venues get closed down as the tournament nears its conclusion some of the Gearhouse equipment is already making its way elsewhere. Some is heading back to the UK, other kit to Toronto for ESPN tennis coverage, and then a lot of gear will be off to the Asian games.

“We have four logistics guys coming in the next week to make sure things go to the right place,” says Moorhouse.