SIS Live

It would seem (the credibility of the posters is sound) that SIS are to shut their broadcast OB business in March. Not surprising given the recent loss of the prime BBC contacts.

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1902243

I knew it was on the cards, but wow.

Broadcast have a short article on the story:
http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/techfacils/sis-live-to-close-its-ob-division/5062721.article

Crikey.
They announced last month that they'd be conducting a "strategic review", but I'm not sure I expected the result to be making everyone redundant and flogging off the assets.

Best wishes to the staff - I've worked with quite a few over the past few years, and I think one may be a regular poster here - and hopefully there will be enough vacancies around at the winners in BBC Sport's recent contract awards so that their experience doesn't go to waste.

I'm not sure what the assets are worth, some of their fleet is quite long in the tooth now, when you compare against NEP, Arena, CTV and Telegenic ?

Sad news but expected when a company has all it's eggs in one basket - as many do.

That is sad news, I'll probably spent less time on 24.5w where the majority of SIS feeds were, I thought it might have survived with taking on other broadcasters work but clearly not.

The other problem for them is Coral, Ladbrooks, Willy hills are all creating there own feeds.

It's not that long in the tooth, most of the non-O21 stuff is less than 5 years old (and OB trucks should last a lot longer than that. The BBC OB trucks they inherited were 15+ years old in some cases...)

SISLive OB 1, 3 and 7 (the backbone of recent Wimbledons) are all pretty modern, effective big trucks - OB1 in particular is an incredibly flexible unit. OB14 is a cracking little HD location truck, and only a bit over a year old. Similarly OB16 is one of the few proper OB trucks with a built in uplink and a decent Vision, Sound, VT and Prod area. (Obviously I'm ignoring the ex-Dales stuff - which was horrid)

They also invested in a reasonable number of HDC 2500s recently.

SIS had a very good mix of trucks - Telegenic basically have a single truck design (and they're very well built). Great for football - but a sledgehammer to crack a nut on smaller shows. Arena have a reasonable mix (including at least one rigid truck that can park in smaller spaces) - but quite a few of their trucks feel VERY similar to SIS's former O21 units in layout and equipment.

Very few have the same quality of in-house comms - many now outsource RF cameras and the more complex talkback arrangements to third parties (some of whom are ex-BBC OBs)

SIS weren't perfect - but they had some excellent staff (even now) - and it is a shame that the legacy of BBC TV OBs has come to a close in this way.

I was talking to some friends about SISlive over the last week - one told me that the BBC Sport contract was maybe only about a third of SISlive's business, and he was concerned about there maybe not being enough slack elsewhere in the industry to pick up the rest. Another mentioned something which also turned up this week's Private Eye: what they euphemistically referred to as "one-off state occasions". I'm not sure if the plans for such OBs would revert for the BBC, or if a new contractor would have to draw them all up from scratch?

Not sure it can revert to the BBC, as the BBC doesn't have an OB department as such anymore (it was sold to SIS in the first place). There's no way State Occasions (think Trooping the Colour, State Opening of Parliament, Cenotaph etc) could be done from a News SNG (which is the only form of Outside Broadcasting that the BBC still runs in house).

I heard at IBC in September, that SIS told the Beeb 'it's all or nothing please' when they submitted
their bids for contract renewal. I didn't believe any organisation (particularly one with very strong competition) could show such arrogance but the more people I talk to in the UK OB business, the more it appears to be true. If it really is true, then good on the Beeb for calling their bluff. Not good for the 'rank and file' staff though