The Red Bull Air Race won a prestigious International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) award in Amsterdam on Sunday, September 12.
After back-to-back Sports Emmy Awards in the United States that the Red Bull Air Race World Championship’s TV production won in the last two years, the IBC award for ‘Most Innovative Use of Technology in Content Creation’ is another top broadcasting honour for the TV production that took the high-speed, low-altitude race to a global audience of 300 million viewers in more than 130 countries.
The TV production captured the drama, speed and skill of the world’s best race pilots on the ground and in the air as they raced their high performance airplanes at speeds of up to 370kph, and it was honoured as one of the greatest challenges in televised sport. The Red Bull Air Race is technically one of the most challenging projects anywhere in the world and has been able to push the boundaries in TV production through a strong partnership with European broadcast companies West4Media, SiVision, SkyMedia and Riedel Communications to produce the live race TV programmes televised internationally.
The Red Bull Air Race beat out other finalists for the top IBC honours including ESPN, the leading US sports broadcaster, for its Live 3D sport coverage of college football and NBC for its ‘consistent loudness’ from the Winter Olympics – audio as a part of creating atmosphere at the Vancouver Games.
Each year the IBC celebrates the application of technology, innovation and individual achievement with a variety of awards in different categories. An international panel of judges looked for creative solutions that delivered real benefits and helped move the industry forward.
The IBC cited the signal distribution at the Red Bull Air Race and noted that “the race programme travels the world, and at each venue the engineering team is faced with the challenge of bringing pictures and sound from across a huge area, and from the planes themselves. The organisers chose to carry everything – video, audio, communications and data – on one easily rigged fibre backbone. Fibre also saves shipping many tonnes of copper cables from venue to venue.”
The Red Bull Air Race World Championship is one of the most logistically complex productions. Flight adds a third dimension to motorsport and requires skills from a variety of expert teams to deal with the entire behind the scenes process from the rigging of on-board cameras to capturing the racing footage from the the RB105 helicopter.
The IBC is an annual trade show for broadcasters, content creators/providers, equipment manufacturers, professional and technical associations, and other participants in the broadcasting industry. IBC is Europe's largest professional broadcast show and is held annually in September in Amsterdam.
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