Last week we were in Liverpool, England supporting the BBC Worldwide Showcase at the Arena and Convention Centre (ACC). It is an annual sales festival where hundreds of hours of BBC Television programming are showcased to over 600 TV and Digital executives from around the world. Making it the nations biggest television export market.
Our role was setting up over 600 streaming media computers, networking and server support. After “Pre-Staging” the event in Birmingham, Howard and his team packed up all the kit and shipped it up to Liverpool for “Showtime”. Once in Liverpool, we set up the whole lot again in 2 days! Again the 3 miles of Fibre and 3000 metres of Cat-5 were laid out, and the 600 plus computers were set up and the Tea kettle was turned on.
Once the kit was all setup, we proceeded to test the Gigabit Cat-5 and Fibre network by streaming media to every single computer at the same time and at varying speeds. We did this many times just so we can ensure a positive viewing experience for the delegates. Then showcase opened it doors and for 4 days the delegates would come in and choose from hundreds of episodes to watch, meanwhile we were in full support mode: monitoring the network and machines from the Server closet.
On the final day at 17:00 it’s time to load out. What took weeks to prepare and setup, took only 5 hours to tear down, pack, and put it all on trucks. We were out of the ACC by 22:00, just enough time for a couple of pints at the nearby pub!
This year’s Showcase was extra special as four of the F1 Colleagues from the states, I included, were invited to help out. A fun time was held by all as we all worked together as one team to pull off another successful Showcase and I am looking forward to next year.
Todd Langowski
f1consultancy 