ISC and WRC.com seems to have worked hard following Eurosports heroic TV-coverage from the Rally Monte Carlo, with more than six hours of live stages sent. Now, WRC.com have announced 3 hrs of live coverage from Norway, but that’s not 100% true… Fact is that the coverage is sent immediately after the stages is complete – which to me isn’t at all live. The good thing with live coverage is to see what happens – as it happens – and get to know about good performances, problems, crashes and the conditions on the screen, not in a results list. All this is destroyed by “delayed live coverage”.

I’m not sure why they are delaying their coverage, but of course it’s hard to produce live TV. I was responsible for live coverage on the Swedish Rally website in 2007, and there was a lot of problems. However, it is possible. It can be done the old-fashioned way with satellites or an aircraft relaying images from the stages – or it may be done in more modern ways, as I proved with Nordisk Mobiltelefon and Daniel Carlsson in last years Swedish rally (see previous post). That solution was based on mobile technology and data transfer using a mobile network with really good coverage. It worked perfectly well!

However, a big part of ISCs problems is their old-school solution taking images from in-car cameras. At least when I worked at the Swedish Rally in 2007, ISC used camcorders in the cars and retrieved DV-tapes from the recorders during service brakes. Of course that’s hard to broadcast live. I guess they’re looking at better options after seeing Eurosport’s coverage from Monte. It’s quite obvious with the technology of today that it’s perfectly possible to do live coverage – you just have to want to work hard and invest. And that’s where the problems seems to have been with ISC… Let’s hope they shape up now.