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THIS SPORT
THIS SPORT
H as small-screen sports coverage reached saturation point? Try polling many of the nation’s house- holds and one suspects the answer just might be an exhausted ‘yes’. The facts of the matter, which will doubtless warm the heart of the other half of those hypothetically balloted homes, is that we ain’t seen nothing yet. This hard reality - glorious news for die-hard sports fans - is passed on by Bill Sinrich, head of production at TransWorld International, officially 25 years old
this year.
“As long as there are new ways to pay for
sport,” says Sinrich, 41, “we will be involved. As people providing the software - not a word I really like using - we must continue to be creative in ways of approaching how to accommodate new outlets as they emerge. Though still in its infancy now, I can, for instance, see the Internet becoming a major provider five to 10 years down the line.”
If the name and that ubiquitous golden logo don’t seem instantly familiar, then try some of these facts for size: every year TWI, the television arm of Mark McCormack’s IMG Group, produces, packages and distributes over 3000 hours of origi- nal programming to more than 200 countries worldwide. Its broadcast partners include the BBC, ITV, Canal +, NHK and Star TV.
Presently inked in on the scheduling board at one of its four smart West London offices are cur- rent or imminent TWI-covered events like the epic 31,000 mile Whitbread Round The World Yacht Race, world championship snooker from Sheffield and live football in China and India. They are, in fact, just a small part of the overall output which recently included the England-West Indies Test series as well as the Australia-Zimbabwe-India tri- angular tourney.
Along with its day in-day out sports coverage, TWI is also responsible for regular TV shows here like TransWorld Sport and the delightfully irrever- ent late-night chat show, Under The Moon (both on C4), Futbol Mondial (on Sky) and Oddballs, a regular compilation of classic and irreverent sporting bloomers on primetime ITV.
Since 1996, TWI has also, much to Sinrich’s
evi- dent pleasure, had its own sports news service
SNTV in association with Associated Press TV (APTV) and this provides six live feeds a day to over 100 customers including ESPN International, Sky and CNN.
It may have been a quarter of a century since the company first started doing business, princi- pally as a showcase for McCormack clients and sponsors, the real TWI explosion has really only been over the past decade or so.
When Sinrich, a cricket-loving American, joined TWI from NBC in 1986 to be in charge of development - ‘to define new business,’ as he describes it - there were just five people on the production side in the UK out of a total staff here of 20. Now there are 360 in production out of 450.
When
two years later he became head of pro-
duction, TWI was producing between 200 and 300
hours a year. That figure has now increased ten- fold which is exceptional growth.
He explains: “TWI has had a presence in the UK for 20 years but opportunities for independent production were few and far between until the late 80s. Apart from the old Superstars programme and some documentaries, we were very small in terms of volume and turnover. At the time I joined the company, there were still just four terrestrial channels, no satellite to speak of nor cable of any note. The States had just gone through its own cable boom during the previous five years and it
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