HBS CEO Dan Miodownik Reflects on Producing Three World Cup Events in One Year Split ops teams, matching the production philosophy to the event drove efforts By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Thursday, November 2, 2023 - 10:59 am
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Last week, the 2023 Rugby World Cup came to a dramatic conclusion in Paris, marking the end of both an exciting tournament for rugby fans and an amazingly busy year for HBS (Host Broadcast Services), which produced three global World Cups: besides the rugby tournament, the 2022 FIFA Men's World Cup and 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup. HBS CEO Dan Miodownik sat down with SVG in Paris to discuss the accomplishments of the past year, the future of big-time sports production, and the technological changes affecting the way events are produced, distributed, and consumed around the globe.
HBS's Dan Miodownik: When you're doing a World Cup in any sport, you're talking to many audiences and have to be broader in your appeal.
How did things go in terms of Rugby World Cup production?
Things went really well. We had a good, strong start, and it just got better and better each week. We also were comfortable with the reliability of our technical platform that supported multiple broadcasters.
Editorially, we wanted to hit the ground running and have consistency from multiple directors as we had an Australian director, an English director, and two French directors. If you look at those countries, they all produce rugby in different ways domestically, so it was important that we ensure consistency while also not beimg so rigid that you can't identify which director is directing. There was still a bit of the director's signature, but we had real consistency in how the live cut works, how well it breathes.
How did match production change from 2019 in Japan?
I wouldn't say there's a huge change in the principles and the guidelines. When you're doing a World Cup in any sport, you're talking to many audiences; you're not just talking to the purists and the experts. Therefore, you've got to be broader in your appeal, but you also have to make sure you don't alienate your casual or hardcore fan. It can be quite tricky.
Working with World Rugby, we've been more consistent this time around with how we've applied that philosophy and those guidelines, and we do have a few more toys to play with, such as the cine-style shooting.
Cine-style shooting has been the growth camera of the last few years in big events, and it lends itself in different ways to different sports. The technology has improved by leaps and bounds as the kits are much lighter and much more portable. Personally, I still feel that it can be a bit polarizing at times: you can feel like you're jumping into something very different to the rest of the live coverage and then jumping back out of it. But that's part of the learning curve.
The 2023 Rugby World Cup IBC was located at Roland Garros in Paris.
In the past 12 months, HBS has tackled the 2022 FIFA Men's World Cup in Qatar, the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup in Australia, the 2023 Rugby World Cup here in France, and other events. What has that been like?
It has been an incredibly intense 12 months. If you take it from the Men's World Cup last year to this year and throw in, on top of that, what we call the usual events - LFP Ligue 1 and 2, Roland-Garros, the Gold Cup, Handball World Championships, and the Ice Hockey World Championships - you can start thinking you can have that kind of intensity year in year out, but you can't. We've learned the hard way that you need to address these projects in a slightly different way, which is that you can't just go from one to the other.
We made the decision, coming out of the Men's FIFA World Cup, that we were going to split out the teams between things like the FIFA Women's World Cup and the Rugby World Cup. Of course, some people want to be involved with everything, so that was difficult. But everybody who works in these events knows that, at the end, you do need a bit of time to debrief and rest before you throw yourself into the next event. That's part of our learning curve over the last two or three years, and it's something that we're applying more and more.
What does that mean operationally?
You need to plan way ahead. You've got to make sure that your resources give your preparation team the space and time needed as well as reinforcing the team more than we've done in the past. Increasingly, these events require more from us technically, editorially, and operationally. So we've widened the teams that we have for the preparation, and we've widened the pool of people we use for events so that we're not relying on the same group of people every single time. When you look at the roadmap of the next two, three, four years, you see all those peaks starting to appear, which means you have to have a bigger team, and you have to invest more in people. We need more people, and we're using more people than we've used before.
Since COVID, a lot more workflows have been available to you for producing events. And each of these three major events had a different workflow. How did that develop?
Every major event is different. There are certain principles you can import, but, honestly, you do start from scratch because every event has a different set of challenges and obstacles, regardless of how much it looks the same as the one before.
I discussed this with [OBS Chief Technology Officer Sotiris Salamouris], and they hear the same thing: Oh, it's the Olympics, and therefore it is the same whether it is in Tokyo or Paris. But, even when events are in our backyard - where we arguably know more about working in France on a big
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HBS CEO Dan Miodownik Reflects on Producing Three World Cup Events in One Year Split ops teams, matching the production philosophy to the event drove efforts By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
