The BRIT Awards go big with Disguise-powered visuals from NorthHouse

Overview

The pinnacle of the UK music year, The BRIT Awards have provided many iconic moments over the decades. In 2026, the ceremony made one of its biggest changes in years, shifting events from London to the new Co-op Live arena in Manchester. Visual media design specialists NorthHouse were called upon to ensure that the scaled-up show was delivered flawlessly. Using Disguise’s powerful media servers in an interconnected cluster, NorthHouse helped put together a record-breaking show, working closely with Chris Saunders and the Ogle Hog team to deliver the visual media for one of the most successful BRIT Awards ceremonies to date.

The challenge

The shift to Manchester’s Co-op Live Arena presented an opportunity for the BRIT Awards to reimagine the show’s visual identity, combining an ambitious stage design with a seamless experience for both the live audience and national broadcast viewers.

To realise this vision, executive producer Sally Wood and production designer Misty Buckley brought in creative studio NorthHouse to design and deliver the screen visuals, broadcast package and digital suite for the event. Their goal was to create a defining moment in the BRITs’ history, delivering a striking visual experience that made the most of the show’s new home.

With the ceremony broadcast live across the UK, visual quality and reliability were paramount. The scale of the staging presented a significant technical challenge, with multiple display surfaces, each requiring its own pixel map, format, position, and aspect ratio. Every element had to be formatted and delivered with absolute precision to ensure seamless playback across the entire stage.

The volume of visual media added further complexity. Nine display surfaces required individually formatted media packages, making manual exporting and conversion both time-consuming and prone to error. Combined with the demands of managing extremely large visual media files, an efficient and scalable delivery pipeline was essential.

The solution

Disguise was central to handling the sheer volume of data required for the show. NorthHouse pre-rendered all media in advance and delivered it directly into the Disguise workflow. The simple integration meant that once the pre-rendered media had been delivered, the team’s energy could be focused entirely on the practicalities of presenting a seamless show for its audiences.

“We knew from the outset we’d be dealing with a large volume of files and data due to the vast array of screens,” says Tom Bairstow, founder and executive producer/director at NorthHouse. “We were so pleased to work closely with Chris and the Ogle Hog team within Disguise, who selected 15TB capacity drives, along with a 100Gb media network – so we knew we were covered.”

NorthHouse and Ogle Hog used nine of Disguise’s GX 3+ and two additional GX 3 media servers to support the show, using the system’s multi-server clustering capability to form a unified session. This gave the media teams the power to distribute 91 megapixels seamlessly, maintaining synchronised, frame-accurate playback across all surfaces. Each surface was assigned its own optimised pixel map for precise geometric mapping without compromising output quality. NotchLC codec ingestion ensured the highest quality pre-rendered media at scale without unnecessary transcoding overhead.

NorthHouse and Ogle Hog also found Disguise’s pixel-mapping toolset essential for managing the many different surfaces of the BRIT Awards stage. The stage’s kinetic lighting towers, built on semi-transparent panels, required visuals that could respond to both their own surface and the surfaces of whatever sat beyond them. Disguise’s workflow enabled the team to easily previsualise considerations like these, and have confidence in their solution before arriving on-site.

The Results

The success of the 2026 BRIT Awards was resounding, breaking records across social media. The show was broadcast live internationally on YouTube, with a total of four million views across different platforms. The show delivered everything that fans have come to expect from the BRIT Awards: a grand-scale celebration of the UK music scene, dazzling and ambitious live performances, and an appearance by Robbie Williams.

For Bairstow and his team, the feedback was unanimous in its praise. Production designer and long-time collaborator Misty Buckley described the visuals as ‘truly epic’, capturing the scale, creativity and humour of her vision for the show.

"The combination of scale, precision and reliability is what sets Disguise apart. At a show of this scale and profile, there is no margin for error. " comments Bairstow.