International Broadcast Centre

• 1. Introduction

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  The International Broadcast Centre traces its origins to a television first at the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics. Before that year, Olympic coverage reached foreign audiences only after tapes were physically loaded onto aircraft and flown city to city. Tokyo ended that practice. Those games became the first Olympics to be telecast internationally without relying on airborne couriers. They were also the first to include partial color telecasts, though only in part. The facility in Tokyo operated out of the NHK Broadcasting Center. Today the International Broadcast Centre, also called the International Press Center or Main Press Center, is a standard fixture at every major international sporting event. By 2034, an IBC is scheduled to operate in Riyadh, extending a network that began in a single Japanese city seven decades earlier.

• 2. Inside Munich 2006

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  966 tonnes of fir wood went into the International Broadcast Centre at the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Munich. The centre occupied the Munich Fairgrounds, spreading across 30,000 square meters in total. Nearly 22,500 square meters of that space was enclosed by wooden panels. Those panels divided the floor into separate allocated sections, one for each broadcaster. Close to 700 doors connected those partitioned areas. Fifteen television studios operated around the clock, seven days a week, throughout the tournament. From those studios, 120 television and radio channels broadcast World Cup coverage to broadcasters and journalists in around 190 countries. The building at the Munich Fairgrounds was not demolished after the tournament ended. It stands today as the Munich Exhibition Centre.

• 3. The Olympic Venues

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  Olympic Broadcasting Services supplies every rights-holding broadcaster at the Olympic Games with a video and audio feed from each competition venue. Beauty shots of the host city and transmission infrastructure are part of that central service. The practical work of building individual studios falls to the broadcasters themselves. They do that work inside whatever large venue the host city has made available. The options have ranged widely, from convention halls and sports complexes to spaces that were never designed for media production.

  In Lake Placid for the 1980 Winter Games, the IBC was housed in a Highway Department garage. The 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona used the Fira de Barcelona pavilions in Montjuic. For the 1998 Winter Games in Nagano, the facility took over a renovated former textile mill. Looking ahead, the 2032 Summer Olympics in Brisbane will run its IBC from a Visy Glass factory in West End.

• 4. A Worldwide Reach

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  Gothenburg hosted the first FIFA World Cup International Broadcast Centre in 1958. The footprint grew from there. Mexico City received the IBC twice, in 1970 and 1986. The United States split the operation across Dallas and Los Angeles for the 1994 edition. By 2022, the facility had reached Doha, and Dallas is set to host again for the 2026 tournament.

  The FIFA Women's World Cup established its own version of this network in 1991. The opening IBC for that competition was in Guangzhou. The event has since moved through Los Angeles twice, in 1999 and 2003, and continued through Shanghai, Frankfurt, Vancouver, Paris, and Sydney. UEFA's European Championship has placed its IBC in a different city for almost every edition since London in 1996. London is scheduled to host again for Euro 2028, three decades after it staged the first.