AV at ICC Sydney: what we've learned producing events there

ICC Sydney is the venue Sydney corporate clients ask about first, and the venue most of our flagship conferences and product launches land at. The reasons are well-known: a purpose-built digital venue at Darling Harbour with three integrated buildings (Convention, Exhibition, Theatre) covering everything from a 50-person breakout to an 8,000-seat plenary, a 10Gbps fibre backbone, and an in-house AV team that knows the rooms better than any external producer ever will.

What is less talked about: the four decisions on every ICC Sydney event that determine whether the production lands cleanly or hits a workable-but-disappointing compromise. The venue is forgiving of small mistakes and unforgiving of big ones. Below is what we have learned working through them across the rooms we use most often.

Decision 1: in-house AV, augmented, or external?

ICC Sydney’s in-house AV is excellent. House PA in the major rooms is line-array, integrated, tuned to the room, and operated by engineers who have run the same rooms thousands of times. House projection and house screens are professional-grade. For an event that needs a clean PA, a screen, microphones, and a basic camera, the in-house package is the most defensible choice and usually the cheapest path to a polished production.

The decision tree we walk clients through:

For a single-room conference up to 300 people, with a standard run sheet, slide-driven content, and a basic livestream for internal viewing, the ICC Sydney AV package is the right call. Adding an external production team in this case is overspend.

For a flagship conference with branded staging, designed lighting, multi-camera broadcast, or any non-standard scenic element, the right structure is the in-house package as the foundation plus an external production team layered on top. The in-house team handles the room’s installed systems (PA, projection, basic mics) and coordinates the rigging and power. The external team handles the broadcast crew, lighting design, scenic build, and any custom production elements.

For a launch or hero conference where every aspect of the AV is brand-controlled (custom staging, branded vision content, broadcast-grade stream as primary deliverable), the external production becomes the lead and the in-house team supports through the venue’s standard interfaces. This is the model for most large product launches at the Convention Centre Plenary.

The augmented model is the most-common structure for our work at ICC Sydney. The in-house team is excellent at being the in-house team. The external production team is excellent at the production layer that ICC’s package was never built to deliver. Combining them works when both teams know what each other is doing.

Decision 2: rigging plot, four weeks out

All primary rigging at ICC Sydney is coordinated and installed by the venue’s rigging team. External production is not allowed to drop chain motors from the venue’s structure. This is not a constraint, it is a feature. ICC’s rigging team know the load ratings of every truss point in the building and they will tell you what is and is not possible.

The catch is timeline. ICC Sydney’s standard requirement is that all AV, staging and rigging requirements are submitted to your AV Project Manager no less than 20 days before event tenancy. For complex productions involving custom rigging, scenic builds, or lighting truss positions outside the standard plot, the conversation should start six to eight weeks out.

What we submit to the AV Project Manager four to six weeks ahead:

A rigging plot showing every desired hanging position with weights and load distribution. A scenic plan if any custom staging is being built. A lighting plot if lighting design is part of the scope. A vision plan if LED walls or non-standard projection is required. A power plan if any custom power distribution beyond standard rigging power is needed. A bump-in schedule showing what arrives when and what crew is on site for each phase.

This is the same documentation any external venue would want, but the ICC team are particularly disciplined about it. A clean submission gets a clean schedule. A vague submission gets a tighter bump-in window and more on-the-day friction.

Decision 3: connectivity for the broadcast

ICC Sydney’s 10Gbps optical fibre backbone is one of the venue’s strongest features for hybrid and broadcast-heavy events. The venue can deliver dedicated production bandwidth that is well beyond what bonded cellular or a temporary wired install would offer.

What this means in practice: a flagship event can stream to multiple destinations at full broadcast-grade bitrates without bandwidth being the constraint. The Connect Hub (ICC’s dedicated digital event studio) is a working option for managing remote presenters at scale, with the same studio used by national broadcasters for events run from the venue.

The decision is whether to use ICC’s broadcast infrastructure or bring your own. We do both:

For events where the broadcast is internal-only and the volume of remote audience is modest (a sales kick-off streaming to 500 employees, an AGM streaming to members), ICC’s in-house broadcast capability handled by their team is the cleanest path.

For events where the broadcast is the primary deliverable (a product launch streaming to industry analysts and trade press, a hero conference where the home audience outnumbers the in-room), we bring our own broadcast crew and run on ICC’s bandwidth. The venue’s network is the delivery layer; the broadcast production layer sits on top, run by our team.

The 10Gbps backbone makes the technical decision easy. What still requires planning is the production decision: who is directing the broadcast, who is captioning, who is managing the run sheet for the remote audience, and how the broadcast cuts differ from the in-room IMAG cuts.

Decision 4: the room you actually need

ICC Sydney’s room inventory is bigger than most clients realise. The decision is rarely “do we book ICC?” and almost always “which ICC room is the right one for this event?”

The rooms we use most often:

Convention Centre Plenary is the marquee 8,000-seat space. Right for genuine plenary events: large keynotes, product launches with significant audience, conference opening sessions, awards. The technical conversations here are about LED wall scale, custom scenic builds, multi-camera broadcast direction, and the rigging coordination needed for any meaningful staging. Bump-in for a fully-staged event here is typically two days minimum.

Pyrmont Theatre is a 2,000-seat purpose-built theatre. Right for performance-style events, panel discussions with theatrical lighting, awards ceremonies, and any event where the room’s acoustics and sight lines should do most of the work. House lighting and PA are theatre-grade; the production layer is usually small here because the room is already designed for the format.

Parkside Ballroom divides into multiple configurations from 200 to 2,000 capacity. The most-used room for medium-sized corporate conferences and gala dinners. The flexibility is the strength and the constraint: the room walls can be moved, but every configuration has slightly different rigging and PA characteristics, so the configuration needs to be locked early.

Meeting rooms at various sizes for breakouts, workshops, smaller conferences. The in-house AV here is genuinely sufficient for almost all standard meeting room use. External production for these rooms is usually unnecessary unless they are part of a multi-room conference where the breakouts need to integrate with a plenary broadcast.

Exhibition halls for trade shows, large-scale activations, and product launches that want a non-theatrical space. The technical conversation here is mostly about power distribution (the halls are designed for exhibitor power, not centralised event power) and rigging coordination across the whole hall.

The room choice should be made before the brief is finalised. Each room has a different AV scope ceiling and floor, and the production cost difference between the same event in Plenary versus Pyrmont Theatre versus Parkside Ballroom can easily be 2x.

What goes wrong, and how to avoid it

Three recurring patterns on poorly-planned ICC Sydney events:

• Production team booked late. They treat the in-house AV team as a vendor to coordinate around rather than a partner to integrate with. The result is duplicate gear, duplicate crew, and friction across bump-in. The fix: include the ICC AV Project Manager in production calls from week one.
• Rigging plot submitted at the 20-day deadline. Should have been four to six weeks out. The result is being told late that the desired truss position is not available, and the production has to compromise on staging or lighting. The fix: treat the 20-day deadline as the latest acceptable submission, not the target.
• Broadcast scope added late. Bolt-on after the in-house AV has been booked. The result is bandwidth, encoder placement, and crew positioning retrofitted rather than designed. The fix: make the broadcast scope part of the original brief, even if the actual decision to stream is made later.

ICC Sydney is the easiest venue in Sydney to produce in correctly and the easiest to under-spec. Most events that did not land here failed in the brief, not on the day. If you are planning a corporate conference, launch, or hero event at ICC Sydney, send us the brief and we will scope the production layer alongside the venue’s standard package.