The World Youth Day 2008 event took place in Sydney, Australia, this summer, and is the largest youth event in the world. The week-long series of events culminated in a Final Mass celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI and was attended by hundreds of thousands of young people from all over the globe. Since its inception in 1986, it has become the largest single mobilization of young people in the world. The culmination of the event, the actual World Youth Day, has drawn millions of people in past years.
This year, in Sydney, World Youth Day attracted 223,000 registered pilgrims, including 110,000 people from 170 nations to make it the largest event ever hosted in Australia. The New South Wales government, working in tandem with event organizers and The PA People, implemented a new public address system to ensure that live pages and emergency messages could be reliably transmitted to every corner of the event. A cost-effective, flexible audio over IP distribution system featuring reliable technology from Barix AG of Zurich, Switzerland, provided the basis for comprehensive crowd management and crystal clear VoIP transmission.
Needs:
Special event public announcements have previously been made using a Peavey Media Matrix located in the Government Control Centre. The audio path consisted of 10KHz lines provided by the local Telco, but these services were not available in all the required locations for the World Youth Day 2008 events, and word on the street was they were proving harder to come by.
The gradual phasing out of these audio tie lines combined with new and isolated PA locations meant an alternative solution was required for World Youth Day 2008 and future events. With no access to dedicated copper lines — which were also quite expensive — and a tight deadline to design, test and install the system, the New South Wales State government began looking into alternative solutions. The goal was to institute a reliable distribution system that could clearly transmit voice and audio to multiple PA locations across Sydney. The fact that additional PA points were added to the network leading up to this event increased the critical nature of the requirement, with serious concerns about losing functionality through the use of a new and untested system.
The New South Wales State government contracted The PA People, a specialist contractor for sound reinforcement, AV systems and communications based in Sydney, Australia, to provide the World Youth Day organizers with a city-wide PA system for general announcements, paging and emergency messaging. After teaming up with local Barix distributor PowerCorp, The PA People chose an audio over IP system featuring Barix Instreamer and Exstreamer technology as its core. The Barix audio over IP technology would provide reliable, live voice distribution and transmission that could seamlessly interoperate with existing Exstreamer mp3 audio playout systems.
The Solution:
The PA People integrated the Barix audio over IP solution to stream live voice from Instreamers and deliver pre-recorded announcements to a host of Barix Exstreamer 110 audio decoders, each assigned to specific zones, to decode and replay audio to local loudspeakers. Up to eight zones could be selected from the main zone Web page, with name and location details provided for each destination.
