Pro Sound Awards: A big year for broadcast events

In keeping with our continued promotion of all things Pro Sound Awards, here’s a closer look at the four Broadcast Event of the Year finalists.

The sports event of 2014 so far – at least until that World Cup started, of course – was the XXII Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in Sochi, Russia, and British broadcaster Channel 4 followed its BAFTA Award-winning coverage of the 2012 Paralympics in London with what it described as “chapter two of [our] thrilling Paralympic story”.

As in 2012, coverage was produced by leading independent sports producer Sunset+Vine (host broadcaster of the 2014 Commonwealth Games), supported by a prominent television marketing campaign produced by Channel 4’s in-house creative team, 4Creative. Digital output was handled by Deltatre, which also worked on the broadcaster’s London 2012 coverage.

Speaking before Sochi, Gary Franses, executive producer for Sunset+Vine, said: “London in 2012 was unforgettable. Sochi will be, too, because once again, the world’s finest athletes will prove there’s no limit to what they’re capable of achieving. Sunset+Vine are proud to be part of another piece of sporting television history.”

Up next is the 14 November 2013 Red Bull Revolutions in Sound event in London, which saw 30 gigs from the London Eye broadcast live and streamed simultaneously online courtesy of thirty SIS LIVE RouteCase systems. Delta Sound supplied a complete audio solution – including Pioneer CDJ-2000 and DJM-900 Nexus mixers, Technics SL-1210 turntables, and d&b audiotechnik Q7 loudspeakers – and both are jointly nominated for the event, which was viewed by an estimated one million people worldwide.

Red TX was at The O2 arena in London on 29 September 2013 to capture the broadcast audio for Unity – A Concert for Stephen Lawrence. For the concert, which was broadcast on BBC2 and featured artists such as Ed Sheeran, Ellie Goulding, and Jamie Cullum “championing youth and social empowerment” 20 years after the death of the murdered London teenager, Red TX used its main Red 1 OB vehicle, with engineers Tim Summerhayes and Ollie Nesham at the controls.

Finally, returning champion Mixbus (Conrad Fletcher and his team scooped the 2013 Pro Sound Award for Broadcast Team of the Year for their work for National Theatre Live), the 7.5-tonne “high definition audio mobile” created by SounDesign, is again nominated for the world’s first 4k live-to-cinema transmission, when the play War Horse was relayed from the New London Theatre in March 2014.

For more information on sponsorship opportunities, email ryan.odonnell@intentmedia.co.uk or rian.zoll-khan@intentmedia.co.uk or call +44 (0)20 7345 6000. 

Picture: War Horse at the New London Theatre. Photo: Brinkhoff Mögenburg

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