#trumphillary: a night of shocks

Election nights don’t come any more surprising than this one. But working on BBC’s overnight US Election results programme wasn’t quite a front row seat to history. You had to be in New York for that, and I was running a hub in the less exotic surroundings of BBC Elstree studios, tucked away behind a suburban shopping street in North London that has definitely seen better days.

However, even from 3,000 miles away, it was quite a story. But why Elstree? The BBC’s presenters were actually in a studio on Times Square in New York. The production gallery was at BBC Millbank, the BBC’s parliamentary base. But the engine room, where all the technology, satellites and comms came together, was at BBC Elstree, the centre of a cat’s cradle of connectivity that worked pretty seamlessly on the night.

I was running a hub, handling some of the BBC’s reporter teams out on the ground. They were in key battleground locations that would decide who won: Miami, Florida; Cleveland, Ohio: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Las Vegas, Nevada. All the crews had bonding equipment, in this case LiveU LU500 units, as their main means of going live.

All four locations were in downtown areas, mostly bars, where people had gathered to watch the night unfold. Sensibly, with so many people using their mobiles, BBC engineers had decided not to take any chances on getting a dependable 3 or 4G signal on the night and had pre-installed dedicated broadband to make sure the pictures got out whatever happened. And it worked well. In downtown Cleveland, for example, we watched as Democrats who thought they’d arrived for a victory party realise by the end of the night that they were actually at a political funeral.

Our sub hub handled all these live contributions, plus lives with similar bonding equipment from a party in Moscow and early reaction from the Asian markets in Singapore.

As a way of getting round the USA and the world affordably, flexibly and dependably, bonding kit takes some beating these days. Though the BBC didn’t go quite as far as the Swiss journalist in Miami who did all his lives from an app on his smartphone (below left). A brave man.....