Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

With a covered area spanning over 750,000 sq ft, the Academy contains an athletics track, Olympic-sized swimming and diving pools, football and five-a-side pitches, judo, volleyball, table tennis and squash courts, karate and fencing arenas, and a gymnasium.

The contract to fit out three Systems Integration projects at the Aspire Sports Academy, The Qatar Sports Club and The Al-Arabi Sports Club – all in Doha, Qatar – totalled 12 million Qatar Riyals (£1.7m).

It is the first time since 1974 that the Games are being held in West Asia and counts on the participation of over 45 countries and regions across a record 39 sports in more than 40 venues.

Gearhouse Broadcast’s Systems Integration Division was selected to complete the project after it used part-funding from UK Trade & Investment’s (UKTI) SOLO programme to exhibit at IBC in Amsterdam – the annual trade show for media, video and broadcasting professionals.

Karen Miles, marketing manager for Gearhouse Broadcast, said: “Using SOLO part-funding from UKTI gave us the confidence to go to Amsterdam, because the risk is minimised.

“The SOLO programme was well organised and the contacts we made at the exhibition were high end.

”The infrastructure Gear-house Broadcast has installed allows any outside broadcast (OB) company to cover multi-camera productions anywhere in the arena, or cover all events at the same time, by simply connecting into the OB room.”

Gearhouse Broadcast will operate the eight complete production flyaway systems – portable satellite antennas that can be taken as checked luggage on commercial airlines – it installed earlier in the year and which range from six to 10 cameras and will be used for the production coverage of the host feed at the 12 stadia where the various sporting contests are taking place.

The flyaways come out of Gearhouse Broadcast’s range of flyaway products and systems at their UK offices.

Gearhouse is also supplying 65 operational crew members including engineers, audio engineers, communication engineers, vision controllers, and riggers.

Provision of broadcast equipment for the Games involves supplying cameras for the field of play areas including high speed, super-motion cameras.

Eamonn Dowdall, MD at Gearhouse Broadcast, said: “The cameras chosen offer the latest technology available and will provide the host broadcaster with picture quality of the highest standard.”

The 12 production control rooms at each stadia venue have been fitted out with nine production galleries and a range of nine vision desks.

Controlled via the desks are replay transition devices which will be used to give the mix effect between slo-mo replays and live production.

All the associated broadcast cabling at each of the twelve venues has also been supplied and installed by Gearhouse Broadcast.

Dowdall added: “We have been working with both HBS and TWI for many years on various international sporting events including the last two world cups and the Common-wealth Games.”