The World Games 2022 in Birmingham, Alabama, USA have successfully ended. The International Floorball Federation (IFF) was very pleased to be part of this 11th edition. The IFF was very happy to be one of the eight sports (out of 35) which decided to engage a production team for being able to show all games live to the world wide sports community.
IFF engaged an experience sports production team (Soundque) who is often producing for ESPN. Unfortunately, there were several issues with the infrastructure throughout the whole event. For the first day the internet connections was only opened (by the local organiser) just before the start of the first game; leaving no possibility and time to install and test all the software by Soundque for a better match experience like replays, scoreboard. Additionally, on the very first day there was a bigger outage for the internet throughout North America. This concluded that the level of the internet provided by the Birmingham Organizing Committee (BOC) was unstable and fragile which forced the production crew to broadcast the stream in a much lower resolution than planned and expected. This continued for the whole event.
Furthermore, the technicians from the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Complex, Swiss Timing and the TV production team were not able to link Swiss Timing (with the clock, scoreboard, match graphics) with the IFF production stream. Last but not least, IFF had no influence on the lighting system in the Exhibition Hall East during the floorball event.
All these plus some other events added up to a stream quality which was not what we consider our IFF stream standard quality. For this we apologize. It was also a learning curve for our organisation that outside our IFF owned events – we need to check many more points to secure the required quality standards.
Moreover, both semi-finals, the bronze and the gold medal games were produced by ISB for International World Games Association (IWGA). ISB/IWGA were the rights holder for those four games, and the decision of which countries could view the live stream is decided by them. Some countries were geo blocked due to their agreements with national broadcasters.
