FRANCE 98 – CIRTV: the world's largest studio
Since the World Cup kicked off, 170 television stations and 130 radio stations have set up shop in the International Broadcasting Centre (CIRTV), located in the International Media Centre (CIM) at the Porte de Versailles in PARIS. 120 days of work, 16,000 m2 of partitions and 200 kilometres of cable were needed to set up the 19,000 m2 building that houses the CIRTV. It’s from this building that signals are broadcast to all accredited stations. 37 billion TV viewers from the four corners of the globe are expected to tune in throughout the duration of the World Cup.
German (ARD/ZDF) and British (ITV) stations dominate the building, each with studios of 1200 m2. ARD/ZDF has a team of 400 personnel working in FRANCE that produces 6 hours of World Cup coverage daily.
TV GLOBO produces three hours of broadcasting each day, as well as providing live coverage of all 64 World Cup matches and numerous special reports.
Just a few steps away, TV AZTECA (the Mexican station), along with all the South American stations, has to deal with a 7 hour time difference with FRANCE. To produce the show “Los Protagonistas”, watched by 50 million night-time viewers in MEXICO, 150 journalists and technicians must work late into the evening.
RAI, the Italian station, is not impeded by a time change. RAI has 500 m2 of space in the CIRTV, 100 m2 of which serves as its broadcasting studio. The director of RAI SPORT, Fabrizio Maffei, explains that all World Cup news (three hours of broadcasting, coverage of all 64 matches, and links with television news programmes) are produced in the CIRTV studio by teams that attend matches and a special group of 10 that is in charge of keeping tabs on the ITALY team (Group B).