Cool club: ISB brings 900 live hours of The World Games 2025 to global viewers By Heather McLean Wednesday, September 24, 2025 - 09:54
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Part of ISB's all-female crew representing the camera operators at The World Games 2025 [L to R]: Natalya Redding from Kazakhstan and lives in the UK; Inga Lind Vigfusdottir from Iceland and lives in Denmark; Mercedes Ortega from Venezuela and lives in Madeira; Manuela Wiebach from Germany; Victoria Elizalde from Argentina; and Julia Walder from Germany
This year, The World Games 2025 was brought to viewers around the globe by International Sports Broadcasting (ISB), which was the host broadcaster for event organiser, the International World Games Association (IWGA).
ISB managing director, Ursula Romero, has taken the production to a new level this year by tripling the number of live hours of the Games, having one of her production teams go viral for being majority female, as well as launching a brand new OTT platform for the Association that enabled viewers to see every second of the Games live, and to connect with athletes and their stories.
Comments Romero: We were the host broadcaster for The World Games. We went from the last few editions of The World Games, where we had around 300 hours live, to almost 900 hours live. We covered all 34 sports live, most of them from preliminaries to finals.
Read more Defeating snafus: ISB on bringing The World Games 2025 global streaming platform to fruition in record time
ISB hit some negativity when it initially proposed covering every event live in China. However, Romero was not deterred. She says: We had some cool innovations, and I think everybody was really surprised. We had some raised eyebrows from some because they were like, oh, we're used to doing an Olympic style and you're never going to that with eight cameras, you're never going to be able to do something like the Olympics . And we were like, well, actually we can .
Romero adds: If you work hard on the planning and you have talented people that know what they're doing, and you have good camera ops, you have good directors, you have talented producers, then you can, and we really pulled it off. [Those negative people] actually came to me in the end and said, wow, this is the best production that we have seen in China in a while . They were all very excited. The local organising committee said that we've surpassed their expectations by a lot, and everybody was very happy.
In China alone, rights holder for the country, China Media Group (CMG) put the live coverage out on its channels CCTV 5, 5+ and 16, as well as a further 21 subsidiary channels. Across those collected channels it had almost 2.4 billion views of World Games coverage. The three channels used by CMG to show viewers the World Games collectively broadcast a total of 99 events, and the opening ceremony on got 438 million views in China.
One of ISB's crews covering all the fighting sports went viral in China for being all-female
Mission Impossible cool
ISB put some innovative technology to work for two World Games events. The camera coverage for one of ISB's teams on the ground was powered by five Arri Alexa 35 Live cameras, with LLA-1 B4 mounts and B4 box lenses, along with two Alexa 35 Live units, running wirelessly and paired with the Fujinon Duvo 14-100. This setup delivered the image quality, flexibility, and precision needed to follow the action.
ISB combined the Arri cameras with Leapus technology, which creates a strobe-like slow motion effect to show viewers every move made by athletes, for the water skiing and wakeboarding competitions at The World Games. Leapus was additionally used in the gymnastics, trampolining and parkour at The World Games.
She comments: We used Arri at The World Games because I wanted to give it an extra glossy look with the Arri cameras and the quality. So we combined Leapus and Arri for the water ski and wakeboard, and it was super cool. It was like these high speed images of the wake border jumping with this water splashing, and obviously with the cinematic cameras, you could really get a feeling for the water and the faces, and then you had this really cool replay in the water. It was really quite Mission Impossible cool.
Female Fight Club
Meanwhile, one of ISB's production teams on the ground was (almost) all-female. Romero says it was a happy accident that ISB employs so many women, which meant when it seemed that an entire team might be female, she worked to ensure the remaining positions were filled by women.
Romero explains: We were putting together a team for China, and surprisingly or not, in China, there's quite a lot of females working on broadcast crews. Out of the 21 crews we were putting together for The World Games, we had four that we were bringing from abroad, and as we were putting the crews together, one of [those four] just out of pure coincidence started filling up just with women, not on purpose. We were missing four or five positions [for that team] so I said, fuck it, let's just find really cool women to fill all of them . So we ended up having a full team from audio assistant to director that was an all-girl crew, all different nationalities, all different ages.
In the end two positions were filled by men because of two unavoidable last minute dropouts from the lineup, with the broadcast venue manager and the production manager.
The majority female team was spotted by viewers as well as sport federations, which led to the crew being celebrated throughout the event. The all-female crew covered all the fighting sports, with jujitsu, karate, and sambo.
Says Romero: They kind of went viral in China because for the jitsu competition, the two handheld cameras operators decided to take their shoes off so that they could be more flexible
