What Does an Outside Broadcast Involve? | Funny Hands Media
What Does an Outside Broadcast Involve?
An outside broadcast (OB) is a live television or live streaming production that takes place away from a fixed studio environment. Instead of bringing the event to a building with broadcast infrastructure already installed, the broadcast infrastructure comes to the event.
This could be a sporting event on a circuit, a music concert in an open-air venue, an awards ceremony in a historic building, a corporate event in an office atrium, or a live broadcast happening in real time somewhere it’s never happened before. If the location has no permanent gallery and the cameras have to follow the action, it’s an outside broadcast.
What equipment does an outside broadcast use?
The core of most outside broadcast operations is a production gallery — either a dedicated OB truck, a flyaway kit system, or a portable gallery built specifically for the venue.
A typical setup includes a production gallery with vision mixing, monitors, comms and a director position; multiple camera positions with appropriate lenses; audio mixing and presenter IFB; replay systems; graphics and branding; and signal transmission via fibre, satellite, bonded cellular or IP encoding depending on the location.
For international events, flyaway kit is packed into flight cases and transported to each venue. At Formula E, our team rebuilt a full production operation at each circuit across four continents.
What’s the difference between an OB truck and flyaway kit?
An OB truck is a self-contained mobile gallery in a lorry — pre-wired, fast to deploy, practical for events in the UK or driveable across Europe.
Flyaway kit achieves the same result in flight cases. More flexible for international work, more complex to assemble, and it requires a team experienced in building a gallery from scratch in an unfamiliar venue. Funny Hands work with established flyaway kit providers when specialist equipment is required; we handle the production management, crew and directorial output.
How complex is an outside broadcast to organise?
More complex than most clients expect. The location that looks perfect on a recce often has no reliable power, no comms infrastructure, restricted access windows, ambient noise problems and no clear camera line of sight. Outside broadcast is as much logistics as it is television.
Our team has been delivering outside broadcasts for over twenty-five years. We’ve worked in purpose-built venues and improvised ones. The disciplines are the same: plan for what can go wrong, build redundancy into the system, and make live decisions without stopping the show.