William Hill is celebrating a major advance into broadcasting with its newly launched £1m facility in Yorkshire, putting it head-to-head with the North West’s Bet Fred
The newly opened Leeds facility took three months to build and was designed by BDA Creative, who previously worked with BBC News & Sport, Sky News, BT Sport, Channel 4 and Match of the Day.
And it comes as the Warrington-headquartered Bet Fred runs its new television channel, beamed into all of Betfred’s 1,365 betting shops across the UK.
And after a celebrity launch with former Channel 4 racing duo John Francome and Jim McGrath, William Hill is now broadcasting a minimum of 50 hours of coverage per week with specialist contributors in both horse and greyhound racing.
Head of Broadcast, Mike Grenham, proudly proclaimed: “These are the best broadcast facilities in the industry. We now have the tools and resources to significantly improve our service to our customers.
“This is a major investment and allows us huge flexibility to expand our broadcast capabilities and improve our programming.
“The studios are housed alongside our Marketing, Trading and Retail operations, ensuring we can offer a truly integrated, targeted, service.”
The seven day a week operation in St Johns utilises about fifty freelancers to deliver live broadcast services plus the Retail TV, aired in 2,400 William Hill shops, has a pool of a dozen contributors in front of the camera and a team of five producing and directing behind it on a daily basis.
This is in addition to a number of pre-recorded shows and hundreds of hours of live radio from an array of broadcast suites.
A spokesman said the ‘market leading’ studios also house green screen facilities and had the ability to apply graphics via a package called Chyron which it intends to be more eye-catching than the fixed captions currently preferred by other competitors in this hotly contested space.
Meanwhile, Betfred TV told us how it be broadcasts from SIS’ state-of-the-art MediaCityUK studios, with SIS providing full production, voice-over booths, gallery with editing suite, and a two-tier studio presentation.
The channel, broadcasts every day except Christmas Day from 8am to 9.30pm, shows live horse-racing and greyhounds using feeds from SIS and Turf TV, and also airs preview programmes created in-house. Twenty technical and editorial staff were initially hired there.
