Women’s Rugby World Cup England 2025 reaches its climax at the Allianz Stadium on 27 September, with Canada facing hosts England. The showpiece finale will cap off the highest spec production the tournament has ever seen.

Handling the production is HBS, World Rugby’s host broadcaster, and the collaboration between the two has elevated the coverage of this year’s edition.

Says Amanda Godson, director of broadcast and production at World Rugby: “World Rugby has trusted HBS to become its host broadcaster, and by working together, tournament on tournament, we have been able to keep diving deeper into the details of the coverage.

“Compared to the last edition in 2021, played in 2022, we’ve taken a huge step forward with our offering” Godson continues. “We have many more broadcasters on site who wish to customise their coverage and the services and facilities we are providing them with allow this. We have listened to the feedback after the last edition, which helped us identify more opportunities to enhance the output with new additions such as the Additional Content Feed, specialist cameras and more ENG and digital coverage.”

Visual storytelling

Supported by Gravity Media as the technical services provider, HBS deployed a drone and a cine-style camera for the opening match and ceremony. Comments Gareth Jones, HBS’ director of production and HB project director for Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025: “The drone gave that big tournament feel straight away. Having those aerial shots pre-match really set it apart from being a regular match or domestic tournament. It was deployed again from the quarter-finals, and for the final at the Allianz Stadium, we have the addition of the aerial camera, which will be fantastic for that occasion.”

Jones says the camera plan for Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 is greatly enhanced from the previous tournament: “We started big with 19 cameras for the opening match and then consistently through the pool phase we had a 17 camera plan. For the quarter finals and semi finals we ramped it up to 20, and we will reach 23 cameras for the final. That number includes a cable camera system, and on top we also have additional cameras around the venue for social media coverage.”

All that fantastic coverage is enhanced by a new graphics package, developed by AE Live’s design arm, Ignite. Comments Jones: “With the number of different stats and real estate you have on the screen, it’s very important that the graphics package is state-of-the-art. There is a lot of data fed into the graphics and we are looking to really support the directors in their coverage with the strong visual story-telling elements of the toolkit.”

Godson notes: “We really wanted to make sure that the audience understood what was happening, using a really clear graphics package that engages, excites and educates the viewer at the same time.”

More is more

New this year is the Additional Content Feed (ACF), which enables the delivery of a lot of additional content pre-match and acts as an outlet for post match activity material. “I love it because it enables the rights holders that are customising their feed, either from home or on site, to have quick and easy access to the additional camera angles of match, player and fan vision,” explains Godson.

“It gives rights holders the flexibility to work from home and they don’t need to send additional crews onsite. The ACF is the first feed up for each match therefore they can start their studio coverage early and include vision from the venue, so it helps with sustainability efforts too.”

The key objective for this tournament has been to cover every moment in detail. “We don’t want to miss anything; that is the priority,” says Godson. “We want to ensure all the activity is covered and that we are providing more than enough content to our broadcasters that helps the storytelling of the tournament, pre, during and post match, including social content that can point to their match coverage and keep the buzz around the tournament going in between the weekends.”

As such, the amount of content available on the Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 media server has been hugely boosted this year and rights holders have been snapping it up.

“It’s a key part of the strategy,” explains Jones. “Making sure this platform is continually refreshed with new content throughout the tournament has been vital. With matches at the weekend, the broadcasters have been able to pick up a lot of really useful content from the different team base camps during the week to then anticipate the matches that come up the following weekend. We have seen some great footage coming in.”

Experienced crew

Creating that content are six host broadcast ENG crews that have been following and interacting with the teams. “Along with World Rugby the first thing we looked at was the scale of the tournament,” Jones says. “The number of venues went up from three to eight for this edition of the tournament and these are spread across a larger geographical area, which opened up challenges and opportunities that necessitated more ENG crews.

“The six ENG crews have been covering the length and breadth of England, sending back the content that is populating the media server,” Jones continues. “They met the teams from the moment they arrived in the country. We had a content capture date with them where we filmed little vignettes with each player, did some stylised player profiles with them and got the first interviews ahead of the tournament. The crews had a lot of work to do in that first week or so, and ever since they’ve been running around like crazy.”

HBS has gone for a team of experienced directors for this tournament. Jones comments on the team: “We have been using an experienced director from the UK, Dan Hudson – for whom this is his first Women’s Rugby World Cup – and we’re bringing that international flavour to the broadcast as well with the French director, Sami Chatti, Steve Jamieson from World Rugby, who is directing a large majority of the matches and also, from Australia, Matt Heaton, who’s worked with us on a number of different Rugby World Cup events as well.”

He adds that this strategy with the use of experienced directors is based on looking forward to the next Rugby World Cups in 2027 and 2029. “It is really about bringing consistency and giving the match directors the tools that they need to give that a similar standard of coverage across all World Rugby events.”

Digital capture

“We bolstered the numbers of digital content creators again because we know how much the broadcasters like this kind of content,” explains Jones. The focus for those content creators is capturing items such as team arrivals at the stadiums on smartphones, through to the coin toss, pitch inspection, players running out onto the pitch right and the emotion post match.

This year some current female rugby athletes are involved in the digital content capture. Comments Jones: “It’s part of the big initiative we have to use current and former players that are content creators. They’re already on social channels and have those relationships with the players that are competing, they also obviously know and care about the game. We are really proud to be working with them and also helping train them as well in the different aspects of our role at major events so that they can start to broaden their general careers in this field.

“They have active roles at the venues, and then we have also tried to utilise them outside of the match weekends to go and interact with the teams where we can,” continues Jones. “When teams are opening their doors to us, these are the people that we want to go in there along with our ENG crews.”

Transmission tower

From a broadcast engineering perspective, World Rugby and HBS have partnered with BT Media & Broadcast to aid with contribution and distribution. Jones explains: “It’s an on-site production so everything is produced at the venues. Feeds are made available to the rights holders at the venue, but centrally we are receiving them back at BT Tower. We’re partnering with BT Media & Broadcast for the contribution and distribution of signals and that is a new approach for both HBS and World Rugby, to have that all under one supplier.

“Our base of operations is our Broadcast Operations Centre (BOC), located at the BT Tower.” says Jones. “We have the quality control of the feeds at the BOC, the monitoring of the world feed, the basic stadium feed and the clean feed, as well as the ACF. All our on-site coordination is based out of there.”

Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025, organised by World Rugby, started on 22 August and the final between Canada and England will be played on 27 September in front of a sell-out crowd at Allianz Stadium in Twickenham.