UEFA European Football Championship

UK

UEFA

What we did

Gravity Media have been delivering technical production solutions for the UEFA European Football Championship for over 16 years. Our services have covered the UEFA Euros in 2004 across ten venues in Portugal, the Euros in 2008 across eight venues in Austria and Switzerland, the Euros in 2012 across eight venues in Poland and Ukraine, the Euros in 2016 across ten venues in France and the 2020 Euros in 2021, spanning 11 host cities including Budapest, Glasgow, London, Munich, and Copenhagen.

What we used

Gravity Media’s Projects team were deployed across each of the host’s cities to install the Technical Operations Centres (TOC) for each of the venues. As well as providing multilateral and unilateral cable installations for each round of the tournament.

Specifications vary from quarter to quarter; however, our standard TOC requirements were as follows:

– Seven Broadcast Racks across each of the eight/ ten venues

– 96 x 96 Pro-Bel Routers & Snell Routers

– Grade A Sony Monitors, Tektronics Waveform Monitors & Vultrix Monitors

– Everts SPGs and multiviewers

– Reidel Communications Matrix

Our relationship with the federation has seen many developments and we continue to enhance our service for each round of the tournament. Following our successful technical builds in 2004 and 2008, Gravity then returned in 2012 to add commentary and RF systems distributions to our list of services. We set up commentary positions to accommodate up to 100 commentators from all over the world. As well as a ten channel RF modular system to facilitate feed distribution from the venue to the TOC and then onto the International Broadcast Centre. RF Feeds were also placed within the commentary area for the press and international media outlets. In 2016, we provided a Cable Interconnection Room (CIR) for channel feed distribution to broadcast partners with an on-venue unilateral presence. We also built and installed a special cameras facility which hosted incoming feeds from the helicopter cameras, in-goal cameras, RF cameras and beauty cameras.

Outcome

Our TOCs supervised distribution of all UEFA’s on-site feeds, including those for Eurovision, UEFA broadcast partners and VAR (Video Assistant Referee) technology which was making its Euros debut in 2021. The 2020 tournament had a cumulative audience of 5.23 billion. The final, Italy v England, at Wembley Stadium was watched by 328 million people worldwide and was the most watched TV event in the United Kingdom in 24 years.

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