Big money for royal wedding footage

If your invitation to the royal wedding never arrived, fear not - thousands of journalists will cover every detail for a global audience of billions in what's been dubbed the media event of the year.

Television networks and print and online journalists from Manila to Mexico City are descending on London to cover the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, the first of its kind in the age of the Internet and 24-hour news.

Ministers expect two billion people worldwide to watch the event on TV, a figure that is impossible to check but looks certain to eclipse the estimated 750 million who watched William's parents Prince Charles and Diana wed in 1981.

Huge sums of money are changing hands for footage of the ceremony at Westminster Abbey, which will be filmed by the BBC, as well as for the best spots to photograph the couple's first kiss on the Buckingham Palace balcony.

Meanwhile websites have mobilised as they would for a football World Cup or Olympic Games, with endless videos, quizzes and photo slide shows.

"It's the major media event this year, because it's a happy event," said Max Clifford, Britain's leading public relations consultant. "All we've had so far this year is one tragedy after another, what with wars and earthquakes."

The BBC will deploy at least 550 staff on the day, using about 100 cameras in Westminster Abbey and along the procession route to provide a live feed to dozens of countries and footage to many more.

About 140 broadcast trucks are expected to set up in Green Park near Buckingham Palace and 48 television studios have been purpose-built nearby in what is thought to be largest outside broadcast ever seen.

Christopher Wyld, director of the Foreign Press Association in London, says he has never seen anything like it.

"There is much greater interest in this than in anything else, including the financial crisis," he told AFP. AFP