Client: Ballard Power Systems

Event: International Broadcast Event

Location: Vancouver ; Detroit ; Nabern, Germany

Event Profile
For sheer scale, few broadcast events come close to Ballard Power's 2001 announcement of it history-making deal with Ford Motor Cars and Daimler-Chrysler-AG.

Ballard is the Vancouver company that became world-famous for inventing the automotive fuel cell, and this news was its biggest ever: two car-making giants were assigning their fuel cell subsidiaries to Ballard for development of an environmentally improved automotive power system, with a $650 million investment to bring it to market.

Ballard set out to leverage the news into an event that would generate international headlines. Public relations manager Debbie Harris enumerated the needs:

• Executives situated in Germany, Detroit, Boston, San Diego and Vancouver would participate in a live interactive one-hour simultaneous announcement, to be broadcast around the world. In other words, they wanted a global press conference.
  
  
• PowerPoint presentations, large screen projection and full television camera packages permitted a broadcast quality product to be produced and transmitted to the world's media.
  
  
• This was to be followed by an interactive media tour, providing all the top financial media with quality access to the CEOs.
  
  
• The event would be video webcast, at maximum power and bandwidth. The goal was to reach a burgeoning online business and media audience.

Mediaco Solutions

"Two satellites, please"

Success hinged squarely on Mediaco's ability to source, coordinate and implement a digital satellite-based system combined with broadcast and telecommunications technology. The goal was to provide simultaneous interactive video communication from Vancouver, Detroit and Nabern, Germany.

Essentially, it worked like this:

• A Mediaco production manager travelled to Germany to facilitate the European satellite connections and event technical coordination.
  
  
• The live broadcast from Detroit was relayed by satellite to a television operating centre (TOC) in Washington DC.
  
  
• There the broadcast was converted in order to be compatible with the European television system.
  
  
• The converted signal was relayed from the TOC in Washington to a second digital satellite, and delivered from there to European TV networks.
  
  
• From the Washington TOC, the broadcast was also relayed to Detroit and five other downlink locations where hundreds of reporters were gathered, and electronic broadcast media received the feed.
  
  
• At each downlink location, Mediaco technicians installed and supervised all of the technical operations and presentations.
  
  
• Immediately following the flawless hour-long satellite uplink presentation, Ballard's CEO Firoz Rasul and Wayne Booker, Ford's vice-chairman, conducted an interactive virtual media tour. Mediaco brought Mr. Rasul and Mr. Booker live to reporters from Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, Reuters, ROB TV, CTV, CBC and the BBC.
  
  
• Online Broadcasting Corporation, corporate webcasting specialist and Mediaco's sister company, was brought on board to webcast the video presentation live via its own dedicated satellite downlink mobile.