By Mike Ransome, CEO

The UK Esports Awards powered by G FUEL – the brand new awards ceremony that recognises top talent in UK esports – is proud to announce a new partner.
Presteigne Broadcast Hire, the leading broadcast hire and rental specialists, are backing the prestigious Tournament Of The Year Award.
The awards are for those working in the esports industry within the UK, or who have worked in it over the past year. Finalists are due to be announced soon recognising talent across 16 categories.
Mike Ransome, CEO at Presteigne Broadcast Hire, said: "Presteigne Broadcast are proud to be sponsors of the UK Esports Awards. We recognise the talent, creative innovation and dedication of those working in the esports industry and look forward to attending the inaugural event in July."
The Awards are taking place on Saturday 7th July and will be livestreamed via Twitch. More details to follow.

Read the article on UK Esports Awards.

Presteigne Broadcast Hire has announced that it has made another multi-million pound investment in hire stock and taken on an additional 21,000 square feet of warehouse, service and operations space. The result is that it has nearly doubled its physical footprint in order to meet demand for its products and services.

Presteigne CEO Mike Ransome said: “We have invested £2.4 million to ensure that broadcasters and production companies who are being pushed hard to generate ever-higher volumes of high quality content have the tools they need to achieve their aims.”

Presteigne already maintains more than £2m in hire stock from the likes of Sony, Canon, Cartoni, Blackmagic Design, Vinten, Sachtler, Leader, and many others, but it has now added 33 Canon CJ12 lenses, 64 new HD/4K Sony Z450 camcorders, Leader test kit, 34 Vinten tripods and new Cartoni tripods – which will usher Presteigne into the cinematic world – plus new lighting options and a substantial range of additional broadcast technologies.

Ransome added: “We’re also very excited about providing a number of Simply Live’s all-in-one ‘ViBox’ production solution, which is a multi-camera live sports production unit that integrates video and audio mixing, replays, highlights and graphics.”

“Our very substantial, additional investment in Sony technology to help with coverage of major global sporting events throughout 2018 is also evidence of our continuing growth, which you will hear much more about during the course of the year.”

As part of its physical expansion, Presteigne has installed a designated, soundproof audio room for design, testing and maintenance and noise reduction technologies – both existing and in development.

Ransome concludes: “We’re fully engaged in a very busy 2018, and we saw it coming, which is why we knew we needed much more technology and space. We knew that because we continually forecast the market and evaluate new technologies and if we identify technologies that have the functionality and reliability our customers need, we invest. Those investments, on the face of it, are in technology we trust, but in the end it’s actually an investment in our customers.”

Read the article on SVG Europe

Presteigne Broadcast Hire is delighted to offer you a fantastic deal on Leader LV5490 Multi Waveform Monitors and LV5770A 3G/HD/SD Multi Monitors.

Some people have been, understandably, getting fairly excited over the prospect of being able to deploy wireless cameras to capture and transmit 4k UHD. Manufacturers and developers are closing in on the ability to deliver systems that will offer up almost endless creative options at the highest – to date – possible picture quality.

Download & read more in this months KitPlus.

Presteigne Broadcast Hire, a leading dry hire and total multi-location production equipment provider, today announced the appointment of Ben Hawker as senior supervisor of RF and Special Cameras.

London, UK, June 19, 2017: Leader Electronics Corporation announces the appointment of Presteigne Broadcast Hire as a rental channel partner. With offices near London's Gatwick Airport and Manchester, Presteigne Broadcast Hire offers a very wide range of production equipment and also develops packaged systems for specific applications.

4K UHD outside broadcasts are no longer a rarity. Most of the major OB players are now capable of supplying a 4K OB production.

Philip Stevens finds out what is required to produce the The Cancer Research UK Boat Races.

The contract to technically produce the Varsity Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge for the BBC was awarded to CTV Outside Broadcast in 2014.

According to Bill Morris, international business director, it had long been an ambition to provide the facilities for this historically important and much-loved part of the British calendar. “The contract had been won primarily based upon – at the time – the ground-breaking use of IP to seamlessly gather the huge amounts of data from along the four-mile river course. CTV, in partnership with their broadcast technology colleagues at Presteigne, had designed an RF and data mesh that would allow unbroken, full telemetry coverage at ground level, giving the production team continuity of signals from all cameras for the first time in the history of the race.

With the advent of new and emerging technologies, and with the one getting the most oxygen at the moment being video over IP, a number of people are asking whether the ability to move control rather further way from an event has, or will, change the nature of OB production.

Well, yes…and no.

2016 saw many OB companies move into 4K UHD live broadcasting, 2017 will see more leap into the IP future. But there's still HDR, VR and 8K to think about. Jon Creamer reports.

Presteigne Broadcast Hire, a leading dry hire and total multi-location production equipment provider, today announced the appointment of Adrian Young as Chief Operating Officer following the company’s recent MBO.

Presteigne Broadcast Hire, a leading dry hire and total multi-location production equipment provider, today announced the appointment of Martin Anderson as chairman following the company’s recent MBO.

Presteigne Broadcast Hire, a leading dry hire and total multi-location production solution provider, today announced the completion of a management buyout (MBO) that perfectly positions the company for accelerated growth as it embraces rapid advances in RF, IP and 4K acquisition, management, and delivery.

Despite atrocious weather that forced the early curtailment of the first day of the Farnborough International Airshow, broadcast systems provided by Presteigne Broadcast Hire performed flawlessly throughout the week-long biennial event to enable hundreds of thousands of aviation business leaders and public enthusiasts to enjoy the full range of events at Farnborough Airport in Hampshire from 11-17 July.

On short notice Presteigne Broadcast Hire provided in5Broadcast with a small, portable live broadcast unit for coverage of the premiere of Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie in London’s Leicester Square on 29 June.

Presteigne Broadcast Hire provided technology, project management, and system design for deployment of its mobile IP Mesh system for Good Morning America’s “GMA on Safari” event on 23 February.

The handing of Channel 4’s £30 million three year presentation contract for Formula One to a rookie sports producer raised eyebrows when it should have acknowledged the Grand Prix pedigree of the winning team. Whisper Films’ MD and co-founder is Sunil Patel who produced the BBC’s F1 coverage before launching Whisper in 2010. Fellow co-founders are race driver turned pundit David Coulthard and BT Sport presenter Jake Humphrey, who made his name presenting F1 for the BBC.

Presteigne Broadcast Hire supplied and co-ordinated the facilities for all programme transmission feeds for the ‘Bryan Adams Rocks Big Ben Live’ concert, fireworks, and outside broadcast for the BBC and its international and news clients on New Year’s Eve.

Presteigne Broadcast Hire provided a complete on-board camera and production solution for coverage of “Six Days of Ghent”, the annual professional track cycling event held at the Kuipke Cycling Stadium in Ghent, Belgium, for Belgian broadcasters VRT and Eurosport.

A ground-breaking technical initiative by Sony Digital Cinema 4K, National Theatre Live and Vue Entertainment continues to push the boundaries of event cinema.

Presteigne Broadcast Hire has launched a new, packaged RF camera system, the SC100. Aimed particularly at sports, the package includes a mount to fit a Steadicam rig, two-way low latency RF circuits, and the ability to colour match to all popular outside broadcast cameras for transparent intercutting with any outside broadcast unit.

From next month, Vue International audiences around the UK will exclusively be able to watch the acclaimed National Theatre Live production Behind the Beautiful Forevers – projected in Sony Digital Cinema 4K for the highest possible picture quality.

SVG Europe recently sat down with Presteigne Broadcast Hire CEO Mike Ransome for a frank and wide-ranging conversation about the broadcast equipment rental business. 

Sporting events like the Commonwealth Games are very much a visual spectacular and the audio side of the various activities that took place in Glasgow have often not received the close scrutiny they deserve. But that doesn’t make the work of those involved in bringing the all-important sound of the games to TV and radio audiences any less necessary.

From time to time, most people in broadcast and production need to rent in some equipment