Dear UEFA EURO 2008™ Broadcast Partners,
The International Broadcast Centre (IBC) in Vienna used the power grid of Vienna and the provider of the power solution installed a protection system designed to detect cuts of power to switch automatically to back-up generators which are on site.
Yesterday, 25 June 2008, the IBC has been affected by three micro cuts of less than one millisecond, but these were enough to cause the Master Control Room to reboot, which takes several minutes. The protection system was defective in detecting the cuts and switching to the back-up power.
UEFA Media Technologies has selected the best providers to build the IBC and its power system, the same one that delivered the IBC and power for the FIFA World Cup 2006. The power has been fully tested according to industry procedures before the event and was working perfectly well until yesterday. According to their experts, those microcuts are very unlikely to happen, but yesterday, probably caused by the massive storm that affected Vienna, three of them happened and because the detection system was faulty, it created the loss of signal. For tonight's Match 30 in Vienna (Russia vs Spain) and for the Final, the power of the IBC has been switched to fully redundant generator power in order to avoid any external factor affecting the power and, therefore, the transmission of the signal.
Furthermore, as an additional step a direct uplink of the SD 16:9 signal from outside the IBC has been put in place. As a consequence, we will provide you with encryption codes to access this signal through the usual channels as soon as possible.
Best regards,
Alexandre Fourtoy