Behind the scenes with TDC and HIVE at BBC Earth Experience Melbourne

Sydney, Australia, December 2023

Find out more about the technology behind the scenes at the BBC Earth Experience in Melbourne.

The BBC Earth Experience is an immersive digital exhibition, narrated by the legendary Sir David Attenborough which has recently opened at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, Australia.

Produced in collaboration with Moon Eye Productions, Live Nation, BBC Studio and Tinker Imagineers, the multi-room digital art experience guides visitors through Earth’s diverse ecosystems across seven continents.

What sets Melbourne’s BBC Earth Experience apart is the playback technology used for this installation. Leading Australian video technology and production supplier, TDC, harnessed the innovative BeeBlade media server from HIVE to power the entire project.

Michael Hassett, Managing Director, TDC begins the behind-the-scenes video narration. He explains, “The main difference is that we’re inserting the HIVE players in the projectors and the great thing about that is it saves a lot of space and power. There’s no cable distribution system, no control room, just the media player in the projectors in the venue.”

The entire exhibit is equipped with 70 Panasonic projectors with 55 creating the central 360-degree high resolution immersive panorama comprising over 127 million pixels. HIVE software enables the precise positioning and timing of every single one of them.

The fusion of technologies at Melbourne’s BBC Earth Experience are harbingers of a new, greener, and transformative approach to digital storytelling.

This is the latest digital art installation for TDC following the technical design and engineering of projects for the Australian Museum and the upcoming Dream Circus at Luna Park, Sydney.

“The fusion of technologies at Melbourne’s BBC Earth Experience are harbingers of a new, greener, and transformative approach to digital storytelling,” adds Hassett. “It is an evolutionary leap, saving time, money and the planet.”