VBTC at the 2023 Pacific Games: An Outside Broadcast Kit for the Pacific’s Biggest Sporting Event

Overview

In November 2023 the Pacific Games came to Honiara in the Solomon Islands for the first time: around 3,800 athletes from 24 nations, competing in 24 sports over two weeks. It is the biggest multi-sport event in the Pacific. VBTC, Vanuatu’s national broadcaster, had secured the exclusive television and radio rights for Vanuatu and set out to deliver the most extensive Pacific Games coverage in its history.

To do that, VBTC’s team needed to take its own outside broadcast production to Honiara: cameras, vision, sound, commentary and every metre of cable in between. Southern Broadcast worked with VBTC’s engineers to finalise the specification, then sourced and shipped the complete kit as a turnkey package, and had it in Vanuatu ready for the team to fly out.

The brief

VBTC first approached us in August 2023, through Warren Robert, then Senior Technical Officer and now Head of Digital and Technical at VBTC, for a professional commentary system. Over the following weeks the project grew into a full outside broadcast package for VBTC’s own coverage of the Games, with the team due to leave for Honiara on 14 November and the Games opening on 19 November.

The timing was the real challenge. Vanuatu receives sea freight only once a month, and part of the original equipment order had been planned to go by sea, which would have arrived too late. Several items were out of stock in New Zealand and some quotes had expired.

The kit

VBTC’s team had drawn up the core equipment list. We took over the supply of the whole package, split it so everything could travel by air, and worked through alternatives with VBTC wherever an item wasn’t available in time. The kit included:

• Cameras and support: broadcast cameras with Manfrotto fluid-head tripod kits, and Blackmagic converters to bring the camera signals into VBTC’s own TriCaster, which handled the vision mixing.
• Commentary: a Sonifex commentator unit for two commentators and a guest, with commentary headsets, in a rack-mounted flight case.
• Sound: a Yamaha MGP24X mixing console, and Rode shotgun microphones on booms for crowd and ambient sound.
• Intercom: Hollyland wireless headsets so the camera operators and director could talk during coverage.
• Graphics: a high-performance laptop with Blackmagic video I/O for live on-screen graphics.
• Cabling: hundreds of metres of Belden SDI video and multicore microphone cable with Neutrik connectors, allowing 50 to 80 metre runs from the commentary position back to the TriCaster, plus the crimp and strip tools to terminate cables on site.

Where a specified item couldn’t be delivered in time, we sourced an equivalent that could, so the package arrived complete rather than partly.

Getting it there

Everything was shipped by air in consignments through October and early November, with tracking shared with VBTC as each one left. The kit cleared customs in Port Vila in early November, in time for the team to pack it and fly to Honiara on 14 November.

At the Games

The Games ran from 19 November to 2 December 2023 across 11 venues in Honiara. Vanuatu sent 158 athletes across nine sports, and VBTC’s crew was there to bring their performances home to viewers and listeners across Vanuatu.

The result

The Games went very well, Warren reported afterwards, and VBTC was grateful for the help in sourcing the equipment at such short notice.

For VBTC, the Games coverage showed what a Pacific broadcaster can deliver with the right equipment and support behind it. For Southern Broadcast, it began a working relationship with VBTC that continues today.

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Southern Broadcast Ltd is a broadcast engineering company providing studio, RF and transmission design, installation and support to broadcasters across New Zealand and the Pacific.

Planning an outside broadcast or live event? Talk to Southern Broadcast about specifying and supplying the kit.