The UK’s Queen Elizabeth celebrated 60 years on the throne with a weekend encompassing horseracing, a river pageant, a huge concert, processions and commemorations that brought British TV its biggest ratings of the year, writes David Fox. Some 68.5% of people in the UK watched some Diamond Jubilee programming, with peak viewing figures of 17m for the concert, 12m for the Pageant, and 7.4m for the carriage procession.
Two of the companies that were present at every Jubilee event were Broadcast RF and SIS Live, providing links and facilities for all the major broadcasters. The biggest event was the River Pageant, which included about one thousand ships, yachts and boats of all types in a huge flotilla on the river Thames through central London, from Chelsea to Tower Bridge. Broadcast RF provided and engineered the majority of wireless video links on the shores of the river, while the on-board coverage from the boats was provided by SIS Live. Broadcast RF had a heavy presence at Chelsea Harbour (with Arena TV), Battersea Park (with Telegenic and Arqiva) and HMS Belfast (with NEP Visions). “This event was slightly hampered by the famous British weather, but that neither affected the RF coverage nor the cheerful mood of the hundreds of thousands of spectators that had gathered along the river,” according to Chris Brandrick, Broadcast RF’s Sales Director. On the Monday night, the BBC produced a concert at Buckingham Palace. The concert set was built up around the Queen Victoria Memorial against the backdrop of a graphically illuminated Palace, where some of the acts performed on the roof. Broadcast RF provided three HD wireless cameras, which were used mainly in and around the stage. The following afternoon, there was a service at St Pauls Cathedral and a procession back to the Palace. Broadcast RF provided 38 RF systems along the route of the procession.
SIS Live was involved in planning for the events for almost a year and provided outside broadcast facilities from ten sites: Canada Gate, backstage at the Jubilee Concert at Buckingham Palace, St Paul’s Cathedral, Epsom Racecourse, Knightsbridge Barracks, the National Theatre, the Palace of Westminster, the Tate Modern/Millennium Bridge, Wellington Barracks and Hyde Park, using nine OB vehicles. It also supplied sound for the Service of Thanksgiving at St Pauls. It had: a total of 251 specialists in OB craft and engineering, uplink engineering, RF engineering and on-site support; 19 uplink trucks with 70 RF cameras, plus an IP truck, serving a range of clients; and 58 uplink engineers, comms staff, RF engineers and maintenance staff. During the weekend, it provided more than 360Mhz of satellite capacity on IS-10-02 and IS-905 for a range of clients, plus 12 fibre links around London and more than 50 transmission paths across the capital for BBC Events over the four days. For the River Pageant the links it provided included 30 wireless cameras. SIS Live’s clients included the BBC, ITV, ITN, Sky News and Sky Sports News, and it set up a mobile teleport at Green Park, comprising Link 21 and UKI-1, bringing in a total of 19 remote feeds and uplinking three for the River Pageant, Concert and Tuesday events in HD MPEG4. Broadcast RF also had six RF systems on dry hire for Globecast, ITN and ITV that were used for the whole weekend. “Together with JFMG careful spectrum planning was required as we were using 33 different frequencies, some in more than one location spread over the 2GHz, 3Ghz, 5GHz, 7Ghz and 12Ghz bands,” said Brandrick. As an exercise in complexity, it was good preparation for the Olympic Games. www.broadcastrf.comwww.sislive.tv
