Multifaceted coverage of the BRICS event in South Africa

By: Alan Hird, Managing Director, Globecast Africa

As another example of our live events expertise, we wanted to share with you our involvement in the BRICS Leaders’ Summit that’s been happening in South Africa.  BRICS is an acronym for the grouping of the world’s leading emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The BRICS Leaders’ Summit is an annual event that discusses political and socio-economic coordination, cooperation and business opportunities among the countries.

We’re providing satellite newsgathering (SNG) vehicles at several locations including the Union’s Buildings in Pretoria (for live and playout) for a Chinese broadcaster. The same broadcaster has a hub at the Sandton Convention Center in Johannesburg and we’re supplying an SNG to downlink pool content, pass it on to them and then uplink their cut packages and live segments back to Beijing. We are doing the same thing for their hub at the Sheridan Hotel in Sandton.

We’ve also been operating the same way for Indian broadcaster based at a Sandton hotel.

In addition, we’re providing an SNG at the Convention Centre for a Russian news agency and one for a Turkish broadcaster — the latter is using it for roaming coverage in Johannesburg and Pretoria.

This project is multi-faceted and also involves streaming the pool feed in English as well as languages spoken in the BRICS countries for the host broadcaster. We’re also providing ad hoc lives and playouts from Johannesburg as well as pool turnaround for multiple clients from our teleport there, too.

And let’s not forget the VOD platform we’re supplying for the host broadcaster so other broadcasters around the globe can retrieve clips from the summit.

Providing this type of high-level, detailed services for live events is incredibly rewarding and exciting for us, and we’re delighted that the broadcasters involved with BRICS have called upon us to do so.