NEP Connect (formerly known as SIS LIVE) provided connectivity and streaming services for production company North One Television’s support of W, the premier entertainment channel of UKTV for its broadcast of “Celebrity Haunted Hotel Live”.

The show aired over five nights from October 27 to October 31.

W’s entertainment show included hilarious sleepovers, terrifying tasks, gripping ghost stories, and edge-of-the-seat paranormal investigations hosted by Christine Lampard, with Matt Richardson and Jamie East.

The objective was to deliver an ambitious new, live entertainment show from Britain’s spookiest hotel during Halloween. Liaising with outside broadcaster CTV, NEP Connect provided robust, reliable and resilient pictures, audio, and comms from a village hotel famous for its ghostly goings on. The challenge for NEP Connect over five evenings, including a daily companion show at 6pm on W, was to provide pictures, audio, and comms from spook-central to a less spooky central London transmission suite.

Following planning meetings at North One Television’s production office in London, followed by a location survey in Kent to arrange suitable parking and satellite visibility from a rural farm, NEP Connect supplied a dual antenna satellite truck that uplinked five feeds to NEP Connect’s MCR in Salford. NEP Connect then provided live streaming facilities for three separate 24-hour YouTube streams from night vision cameras, totalling 360 hours of streamed coverage over the five days of the event. The connectivity also enabled viewers to contact UKTV’s social media team to vote for celebrities to perform certain tasks, as well as a bit of ghost spotting.

“NEP Connect has an exceptional record of delivering robust connectivity to multiple platforms for live events and we enjoyed working together on Celebrity Haunted Hotel Live.”

David Meynell, managing director, NEP Connect, said, “We have a long-standing and successful relationship with North One and were happy that whenever celebrities experienced paranormal activity, our satellite uplink and network operations centre teams would guarantee resilient and robust connectivity. So, when it comes to connectivity, ‘Who you gonna call?’”

NEP Connect’s combined satellite and fibre infrastructure is unrivalled in the UK. NEP Connect recently formally launched Anylive®, a fully managed, rapidly growing fibre network that already connects more than 100 sport and entertainment venues in the UK and increasingly overseas.

North One Television Head of Production Robert Gough said, “We value NEP Connect’s ability to deliver our media content via their resilient infrastructure. NEP Connect has an exceptional record of delivering robust connectivity to multiple platforms for live events and we enjoyed working together on Celebrity Haunted Hotel Live.”

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