1996 Manchester Olympic Games Bid - IBC in Granada?

Not necessarily, where the facilities are housed and which channel the pictures appear are two different things

Yes. Remember Euro 1996, the host broadcaster there was FOTO, and joint effort between BBC and ITV sport, supported by other EBU member broadcasters. I seem to remember one of the studio floors at The London Studios had 'off tube' commentary booths built there ?

Didn't TV Centre have permanent facilities for visiting international commentators at one time? Probably inadequate for the Euros and the number of broadcasters who would want to attend. I know on occasion they built facilities on studio floors, particularly for the Eurovision that was held at the Centre.

The garden studio was most recently used as a café for the Coronation Street Tour. I suspect if the building is still there it won't be for much longer.

Not sure what you mean by 'permanent' - but yes, multiple commentary areas for off-tube, off-site commentary were sometimes built in studios at TVC when the UK hosted large events.

These days any major event like a World Cup, European Championships, Olympics, Paralympics etc. would need an IBC to be built. It would be close to impossible to accommodate the requirements within existing studio facilities - however if there was suitable land near an existing broadcast centre in which to build an IBC then that might make sense. Similarly if a broadcaster wanted to move to new facilities AFTER the event, and take over the IBC as a new venue, that would make a lot of sense.

However IBCs provide core infrastructure (feed routing, recording, managament etc.) but individual broadcasters who hire space in the IBC usually handle their own equipment provision and installation, via third party systems integrators (if they don't do it in-house) So the facilities used by the BBC, NBC etc. in Rio won't have been part of the IBC spec, they will have been added by the BBC or NBC, and removed by them at the end of the event (BBC did a sharing deal with C4 to share galleries I believe, so C4 are now using the BBC galleries in Rio)

There were discussions about the BBC or ITV taking over the Stratford IBC after London 2012. In the event, Timeline/BT Sport took over some of the space, though as discussed above, this was largely an infrastructure benefit, they weren't buying fully equipped galleries that had been sitting empty.

There was, apparently, a dedicated International Commentary Area that was part of International Control Room http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/tvc_handbook.pdf

Also it seems there was a specific vehicle used on-site to handle commentaries from visiting commentators in the venue http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/archive/pdffiles/.../bbc_engineering_113.pdf

Ah - there may have been in the earlier days - not sure how big it would have been, probably suitable for a small number, rather than the size of a studio (which is what was needed for some set-ups)



Sadly a broken link - but yes, there were definitely specialised facilities available out-on-the-road for that.

Google doesn't make it easy to get PDF addresses out of the results pages! Try http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/archive/pdffiles/engineering/bbc_engineering_113.pdf

I do have vague recollection that "Off Tube Commentary Areas 1 &2" were required as part of the local presentation evacuation procedure, where transmission could be moved from the main block of TC to Stage V (post production centre) but wasn't serious enough to be relocated to Pebble Mill. Quite how many OTCA suites were available by then I don't know. Could well have just been those two! The announcers went into the OTCAs, the other staff used VT and Edit suites.

I suspect the OTCAs were used by BBC Sport quite heavily in to the 80s (and into the 90s) where they took all sorts of sport down-the-line with no on-site presentation or commentary teams.

There was a story of somebody being surprised to see Murray Walker sitting in the middle of a darkened Pres A or B with a monitor and a mic doing an off tube commentary.

Murray mentions in his autobiography that in the first full F1 season covered by the BBC (1978), they would fly him out to the circuit for the qualifying sessions, have him chat to some of the drivers, film some links, then fly him back to BBC Television Centre to watch the race live, they would then cut it down to a 1 hour broadcast, which he would then do "live" commentary over. If you watch races from that season, it's pretty obvious that Murray already knows the result and his commentary is less spontaneous than it became later on!

The following season, when Hunt joined Murray, they started covering races live. The flyaway races outside Europe were done off-tube though unless the host broadcaster paid for the BBC commentators to go there. I believe the last race to be covered off-tube was the 1994 Pacific Grand Prix held in Japan, also the final BBC race to be highlights-only in the original run