Ascent Media handles asset management for Live8 event

Ascent Media Group played a central role in the worldwide coverage of the Live8 event as part of its contribution to the Make Poverty History campaign.
AMG handled all the asset management and electronic distribution of broadcaster insert packages to broadcasters worldwide for the Live8 events held globally on July 2. In all, 40 minutes worth of material was accessed by 37 broadcasters with 174 Gigabytes of content being accessed from 1245 downloads, and 3.3 Gigabytes from 750 streams. In addition, AMG provided fibre optic links between its Stephen Street facility and its site in New York for use by the Philadelphia event producers and US broadcasters, with a similar link used to send material to Paris for use by French event producers and broadcasters. The series of pre-prepared video segments that highlighted the key messages of the Make Poverty history Campaign were played throughout the concert to convey to audiences the scale of poverty in Africa. St Anne’s Post provided postproduction services for five of the films, one on Martin Luther King by Paul Greengrass and four by Nick Fletcher (Annie Why, Annie In Africa, Fifty Thousand People and Counter), all aimed at getting Live8’s message across.
“Everyone at the company has really clubbed together to make this happen and Ascent played a central role in allowing us to handle the sheer scale of content being downloaded by broadcasters,” explained Business Development, Marcus Gage who oversaw the project. “We had very few technical issues that arose and even though we were still receiving material to upload to the server at about 7.30 on Friday night, everything ran very smoothly.”
The scale of the project was made possible thanks to a combination of AMG’ s resources worldwide and the time and the effort devoted by staff members such as Scott Pawsey and Matt Feltham. Pawsey took care of all the encoding and uploading of content to the servers, while Feltham ensured that the servers kept going throughout the event. In addition, AMG has provided editing, duplication and DVD services at no charge, for the DVDs that were used by the Live8 organisers to get their message across to G8 heads of state, finance ministers and key UN representatives in the run-up to the event.
(GB)