Avid Customers Score at World’s Biggest Sporting Event

As the Spanish captain Rodri lifted the Men’s World Cup trophy above his head and celebrated with his teammates, the curtain came down on 39 days and 104 games of the biggest sporting event on the planet.

But amid the roar of the crowd and the pyrotechnics, you could almost hear a sigh of relief from the technical and production teams who had brought the games into our homes, our screens, and our lives since early June. Producing a tournament on this scale is a serious undertaking.

While so much of the attention rightly focuses on the live production and viewing of the matches themselves, this was also a tournament which lived on second screens and in highlights reels. The life of the match extends far beyond the final whistle—and that matters, both culturally and commercially.

Viewing the game in real time is one thing, and the shift to streaming viewing rather than traditional television was confirmation of a growing trend. But dissecting the action through the halftime interval or rewatching the key moments and highlights afterwards relies on the skills and abilities of editors and producers whose job it is to identify and edit the key moments, produce them, then distribute them to any platform for viewers to enjoy and to engage with.

Avid customers across the globe have been covering the tournament—the biggest of its kind ever due to having 48 teams involved for the first time—and each has relied on the stability and reliability of their systems to deliver when it counts, driving reach with their audience and opening commercial opportunities.

A coordinated approach to production

Producers have watched matches and cut highlight rough cuts using MediaCentral | Cloud UX. Editors have used their skills to quickly turn out their edits for the halftime show or post-match analysis using Media Composer. Social teams have clipped up the talking points and delivered them to their own websites or shared to their digital platforms.

All of this relies on the backbone of reliable ingest, playout, and shared storage. Live games were recorded into systems using Avid | Stream IO while the robust, high-performance shared storage Avid NEXIS provided simultaneous access to users who then edited the footage into the highlights that were shared quickly with their viewers.

The event also transcends the traditional sports audience. It is a global social event. Newsrooms have depended on their iNEWS Newsroom Computer System (NRCS) to produce and tell the stories of their national teams’ success or failure in bulletins and evening shows as they attempted to make their way to the final in New Jersey.

Collaboration is key

All of this highlights a key tenet of Avid systems: the ability to deliver collaboration at scale, when it counts.

The preparation takes months and years of planning, and while the aftermath of the tournament may feel like a bit of a come down after more than a month of excitement and tension, it is also an opportunity for production teams to reflect on the success of what they have achieved.

And (whisper it) it may also be the chance to begin to plan for the next Men’s event in four years’ time. The 2030 edition will be hosted by Morocco, Spain, and Portugal, with three matches to be played in South America to mark one hundred years since the first tournament in 1930. And with Spain as new holders, what a fiesta that promises to be.