7th June 2009

Monday 1st June saw the Televideo team descend on Almaty, Kazakhstan, to begin preparations for the live international coverage of the England v Kazakhstan World Cup Qualifier match, taking place the following Saturday 6th June.

Televideo provided the outside broadcast facilities for Pitch International and Setanta, with coverage being taken by several countries worldwide.  

Having had the job confirmed at short notice, time restrictions meant that rather than transport an outside broadcast vehicle, all equipment had to be flown over 3,500 miles, and rebuilt on arrival. Televideo engineers, operational crew and riggers received 230 boxes of kit at the stadium, and it was then all hands on deck to re-create an outside broadcast unit in the two cabins provided inside the OB compound.

A VT department was built alongside engineering in one cabin, with a production and sound suite built next door; both cabins were fully fitted out with the Televideo de-rig kit.  From this control centre the 13-camera broadcast was directed and transmitted to hundreds of thousands of football fans across the world, with 3 uplink units being used for the various feeds.  A synchronous twin generator was also flown out, which was set up for fully redundant power. 

Managing Director of the Televideo Group, Paul Scivill, also travelled to Almaty.  He said after the game, “The job has gone extremely well – in spite of a tight turn-around and some unusual circumstances everyone on the team has performed magnificently. From having the job confirmed it has been pretty hectic – transporting all the kit and flying 30 people out to Kazakhstan is not an easy task, then to have to rebuild all our equipment here was interesting to say the least!  But we’ve all had a great adventure and our clients are happy, which is always our end goal!”