Volvo Ocean Race partner with IMG Sports Media

With one year for the race to begin, Volvo Ocean Race 2011-12 announced its tie up with IMG Sports Media as official television partner.

The racing will begin in Alicante, Spain on 29 October 2011.

“Our ambition is to create ‘event’ television that becomes ‘appointment to view’. A mix between live, highlights, short form and news programming will enable us to strike the right balance between the offshore ‘DNA/essence’ of the race, and made-for-television spectacles such as the in-port races,” says director of Television for the Volvo Ocean Race Adam Binns.

A host of programming will be produced and distributed by IMG including a series of ‘Golden Moments’ showcasing the footage of the ocean race.  Live video conferences, daily and weekly news updates will also be broadcast around the world.

Binns says, “IMG and SNTV are the perfect fit for us. Our race will be consumed when the viewer wants, on all kinds of devices so it is essential we work with a company whose experience across television, mobile, broadband and IPTV is unrivalled.”

The hub for the regular updates will be the new NASA-inspired Race Control room in the Spanish Race Headquarters

Six teams have confirmed for the race.

Volvo Ocean Race CEO Knut Frostad says, “I believe the syndicates we are working with have had great success since the end of the last Volvo Ocean Race. We have managed to jointly, with the teams, raise over 210 million Euros in sponsorship and rights fees in this rocky economic climate and, while that is an amazing achievement, we continue the push to bring more boats to the start line next year.”

Says Frostad, “Our ambition is to become one of the top sporting events in the world and we have directed our attention towards a few key areas which we believe will help us to achieve this goal.  One component is the way in which we communicate the event to a wider audience, which has led us to appoint IMG as our television partner.”

The other partners for the race are Inmarsat, BCG, Thrane & Thrane, Puma, Volvo Penta, Ericsson amongst others.

During the nine months of the Race, which starts in Alicante, Spain in October 2011 and concludes in Galway, Ireland, during early July 2012, the teams will sail over 39,000 nautical miles via Cape Town, Abu Dhabi, Sanya, Auckland, around Cape Horn to Itajaí, Miami, Lisbon, and Lorient.