International. For an event of the magnitude and importance of the Pope's 2025 Youth Jubilee, absolute redundancy is critical. In this case, the manufacturer DirectOut was in charge.
Luca Giaroli of DirectOut designed a networked audio, video and control system that provided the perfect infrastructure, working tirelessly to ensure that the audience of more than one million young people heard every word of this very special Papal Mass.
The Catholic Church recognizes a Jubilee or Holy Year every 25 years. This year offers Catholics the opportunity to renew their faith and commit themselves to a just world. The Youth Jubilee was a week-long international event that brought together hundreds of thousands of young people for prayers, Masses and even a pilgrimage of faith that culminated in the opportunity to enter the Vatican's Major Basilicas through the Holy Door.
Held in Rome in August 2025, the event occurred on a large scale. The public area alone was more than 5 kilometers wide, with more than 80 towers offering audio and video throughout the venue. Installed by the Italian production company EventManagement, each tower was equipped with public address systems, giant screens and DirectOut smart platforms. These were fed from a RAVENNA audio-over-IP distribution network and each tower had fail-safe redundancy throughout the network. Additional DirectOut solutions were also used in the room, stage and broadcast audio systems, with a total of nearly 100 DirectOut smart platforms.
The audience area was huge. The distance between the first and last towers took more than six minutes by car, and the audio delay between them exceeded five seconds. These towers provided all audio and video services, including emergency announcements, so a failure was inevitable.
Designer Giaroli has a long professional career specialising in providing complete redundancy for massive sporting and live events, including designing the audio networks for major international shows such as the Eurovision Song Contest 2022 in Turin, Euro 2020 and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. This vast experience has allowed it to offer the necessary redundancy to guarantee the smooth running of an event of such importance.
His design for the Youth Jubilee had to contemplate a solution for any imaginable failure. This included an ingenious disaster recovery solution that relied on the installation of a terrestrial television receiver on the audio and video towers. This receiver could provide a direct transmission of the event's broadcast signal, so that in the event of a total network failure, the towers could continue to transmit audio and images to attendees.
The addition of a local emergency switch allowed the show's signals to be automatically turned off and a microphone to be connected to the PA tower. This ensured that, with very little explanation or training, any volunteer attendee could easily address the crowd and provide critical safety information if needed.
This was made possible by the fact that the DirectOut smart platforms were programmed to automatically detect a fault and the consequent lack of network signal, seamlessly switching to a backup one. This reliable functionality formed the basis of Giaroli's fully redundant design, ensuring that any failure, whether human or technical, would not affect the audience's experience.
"I had to anticipate and anticipate possible problems in the main network and in the redundant network; therefore, it could not rely on only a main and a backup network. I needed a disaster recovery method that was prepared for a total loss of the network," he explains. Something unstoppable is terrestrial television. No one can stop RF transmission, so from my first designs I included the possibility of detecting the absence of a network, routing the analog signal of the audio from the television transmission to the speaker system. EventManagement implemented a combination of intelligent DirectOut platforms, including MAVEN. A and PRODIGY. MP, to perfectly meet this requirement.
The success of large-scale public events is not a matter of luck, but of careful and thorough planning, and the experience to choose the right solutions. For Giaroli, the Youth Jubilee was the culmination of more than two years of planning. His attention to detail and audio expertise ensured that the show went smoothly and that around a million young people heard what they had traveled from so far away. As he concludes, the mass and associated performances would not have been possible without the technical expertise of his small team of engineers and the precision engineering of DirectOut solutions.
"This was a special environment," he concludes. "I was solely responsible for not only the broadcast and amplification of the event, but also the delivery of emergency and maintenance information. Regardless of the options available, only the most reliable ones could be chosen, and those had to be the DirectOut Smart Platforms."
