The news on the road — Noovo's FlyPack

The context

A newscast that leaves its studio is television going to its audience: setting up in a public square, in a region, at the heart of an event — and producing the show right there, in front of people. Noovo wanted that capability. For that, the control room had to travel too.

Bell Media entrusted us with designing a FlyPack: a complete production control room, in road cases, built for the road.

The constraint

Traditionally, taking a newscast out of its studio means a production truck and a satellite link. The FlyPack had to do the same job without the truck: the signal travels back to the broadcast centre over bonded cellular, and the kit has to run on battery — because a sidewalk has no power outlet.

The other challenge is repeatability. The kit has to deploy in a public square one morning and a community hall the next, and work on the first try both times — set up and operated by the production team itself, not by an integrator dragged along on every trip. And outdoors, there’s what a studio never sees: weather.

What we did

We designed and assembled the complete control room: a 12G video routing matrix, a compact digital audio console, control monitors, broadcast intercom headsets, and battery-powered Electro-Voice speakers with their rain covers — because the crowd on site has to hear the show, rain or shine.

Two details sum up the kit’s philosophy. The teleprompter travels in a case and is fed by the cellular link’s video return — the anchor reads their script anywhere, exactly as in studio. And every connection runs through a custom patch panel, labelled, in the same order at every deployment: that’s what turns a pile of equipment into a control room, set up and torn down without improvisation.

What’s in the kit, and what the sidewalk demands.

Then the part most deliveries skip: training. The teams were trained on the console and the full kit before the first outing. And the kit isn’t frozen — it keeps evolving with Noovo’s operations team, outing after outing: battery production power, self-contained lighting, reinforced transmission.

The result

Noovo has a control room that travels: a newscast can be produced wherever the story is — in front of its audience — with the same reliable technical chain at every deployment, operated by the production team.

It’s a principle we apply at every scale: the best mobile equipment isn’t the most impressive — it’s the kit that works the same the tenth time as the first.