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Liverpool Direct Limited (LDL) was today praised for its superb ICT support provided to ACC Liverpool as the arena hosted the 15th annual MTV Europe Music Awards on Thursday Nov 6th 2008.

The event was broadcast live and was only the third time that the UK has hosted the Awards; previously the event has been held in London (1996) and Edinburgh (2003).

The hosting of this event was a huge challenge for both ACC Liverpool and LDL as it is the largest event of this type in Europe and the biggest show ever to be held at the venue so far.

Tim Banfield, general manager of the Echo Arena, said: "To put it in context, in the arena business this is as big as it gets - there isn't a higher profile event anywhere else in the whole of Europe."

The huge effort by LDL to ensure the event went smoothly began months before with the creation of a robust ICT solution design specifically for the MTV event. Aware that this was the first time that the IT infrastructure was to be tested to its full potential the LDL team worked closely with the MTV IT team prior to the event to understand fully their technical requirements.

LDL successfully demonstrated the flexibility and capability of the ACC Liverpool’s IT infrastructure by:

Creating artist, media and dancers villages out of converted storerooms and VIP rooms – complete with all required ICT functionality.
Flexing the internet pipe bandwidth from 10mb to 100mb to meet MTV’s IT requirements.
Providing MTV with a secure ‘Site to Site’ VPN to its London office.
Enabling a VLAN for ‘Getty’ with guaranteed bandwidth to facilitate the sending of photos around the world.
Providing 10Mb/s Quality of Service to enable a global live webcast of the show to be streamed.
Configuring VLAN’s on the Cisco 3750 access switches for MTV, the Press, Getty and guest users and allocating internet bandwidth accordingly.
Creating WiFi accounts and end user accounts.
Providing an out of hours firewall specialist on the day, a pre event support engineer and an event support engineer.
ISDN, PSTN, VOIP and internet connectivity and support for the live MTV Satellite broadcasts, BBC radio 1 and BBC news broadcasts - and finally……an effective post event roll back strategy!

In total, MTV were on site for 10 days throughout which the LDL team continually anticipated requirements and proactively managed the customer. At times additional technology was demanded at very short notice and praise must be given to the BT team who ensured that any required hardware was delivered quickly and enabling ad hoc changes to be completed efficiently and effectively.

This huge and demanding event has further established LDL as an excellent ICT provider with positive feedback from all parties regarding the infrastructure provided and the support throughout the tenure.

Thanks and praise must go to all involved in this high profile and extremely successful event as the team were often asked to work additional hours late into the night to ensure the requisite ICT was available the next morning.

Recognition for their efforts goes to Mark Porton, Dave Hampson, Graeme Murray, Chris Jones and Mike Thwaite from LDL. Also to Lewis Henderson, Peter Jackson, Mark Lepts and Alex Rastelli from CC, and finally to our colleagues in BT Wayne Hambridge, Paul Bappoo, Shelagh Mulholland, Paul Little and Sam Bernstein. "Everybody is still saying great things about this year’s event so again I must say a massive thanks for all your help whilst we were on site," said Sean McNally, Production Co-ordinator, MTV Europe Music Awards 2008.