STORY:
BBC Unveils Millennium Coverage Plans

58 nations will participate in global 27 hour broadcast on New Year's Eve

With the passing of each day, producers and technicians at the BBC's London headquarters are racing to piece together one of the largest global broadcasts in history. On New Year's Eve, 58 nations will beam live footage of their own New Year's Eve celebrations directly into BBC Television Centre. The BBC will then continuously edit the coverage and transform it into a cohesive 27-hour program, to be sent back out via satellite to TV stations around the world.

The project, called 2000 Today, has been two years in the making and will make broadcasting history according to This Is London. It will be the first time there has been a world "channel for a day" as the BBC calls it. The millennium show will mark the first time there has been a global broadcast that includes coast-to-coast contributions from Russia.

The coverage will take in footage from 36 time zones. Russia alone has 11 time zones while the US has six. Each broadcaster will provide around half-an-hour of coverage to make up the 27-hour total. Muslim countries will inevitably offer slightly less because they will not be celebrating the New Year.

The broadcast will begin on Kiribati, a Pacific island that will be first to see in the millennium. Along the way the coverage will take in a New Zealand Maori mountain-top call for unity led by Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

At midnight in the UK the coverage will be centered in London with reports from up and down the country. According to This Is London, the BBC is keeping its plans for midnight secret for now although footage from the Millennium Dome and the Wall of Fire, the fireworks which will run down the Thames, are likely to be included.

Funding for the project has been based on the Olympic Games model. The amount each country puts in is in proportion to its number of viewers and its Gross National Product, so even the poorest are not excluded. The BBC is not expected to make a profit from the that has an estimated cost of £80million ($132 million US).

Source: This Is London

DATE: 9/23/99

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