Paris 2024: OBS gets up close and personal to capture Olympic spirit

The IOC’s broadcast of the 2024 Olympic Games will be bigger, faster, leaner and more data-fuelled than ever before, no doubt reaching a record-breaking audience online and on TV too. But for all the panoply of tech tools trained on athletes, spectators and vistas in Paris, there is one deceptively simple mission for the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) - to communicate the Olympic spirit.

“Unlike traditional broadcasting, which was one broadcaster talking to mass audiences, now we also have capacity to collect individual reactions,” enthuses Yiannis Exarchos, CEO of OBS. “For me, this opportunity is fascinating because it can lead to a gradual and complete democratisation of storytelling. It can mean the virtual participation of every single person in this common human narrative. That is the Olympic Games.”

Exarchos’ Olympic journey began assisting the Athens bidding committee in 1997. He helped set up the host broadcasting operation for the Athens 2004 Games and subsequently the IOC’s own host operation, OBS, which it took in-house to better manage the sheer scale and complexity of the job.

Exarchos has long wrestled with what it would mean to the viewer experience - and the fate of individual sports - if a myriad of possible angles and personalised channels replaced the traditional directed world TV feed. In essence, how could the shared experience of the Olympic spirit be maintained if the audience was watching a different version of the live event – or worse – not watching at all?

The answer for Exarchos is inclusivity. OBS is expanding what is meant by ‘world feed’ to include as much coverage from as many angles in as many formats output to as many channels as possible.

“The Olympic Games is still one of the few events that have this unique capacity to aggregate very large and diverse audiences,” Exarchos says. “I would say that coverage is probably in equal measures geared towards linear television and digital. At the heart of what we do, long-form storytelling remains very, very important.”

Tokyo 2020, which was broadcast to the world from behind closed doors in 2021, demonstrated how vital digital and social media engagement was to the Games but another innovation grabbed Exarchos’ attention.

This was the ‘Athlete Moments’ segment where athletes at certain venues could see and talk with family and friends live on a giant screen. That is being expanded from 15 to 35 disciplines in Paris with the ambition to cover 80% of competing athletes despite the venues being full of spectators.

“People still want to see reactions from all over the world,” he says. “The technology enables this personal participation, contribution and interaction with everyone out there. The fundamental point is that digital technology can reach everybody, and get a reaction back from them.”

Another trend that OBS is catering for is demand among broadcasters for getting closer and closer access to the athletes. This will be noticeable in coverage in Paris.

“Our coverage will go behind the scenes, use cine-style cameras and lenses and get close to the athletes from the moment they arrive in a venue. It’s very, very clear that viewers care a lot about that.”

Then there is Paris itself. “The fact that we are in the birthplace of cinema in Paris [where the Lumiere Brothers screened their first motion pictures] also helps us with that. Plus, we have this incredibly photogenic backdrop of the city.”

OBS plans to produce 11,000 hours of content, equivalent to 450 days of content compressed into just 18 days from Paris. “I don’t think that there is a network in the world that produces that in a year,” says Exarchos.

Yet it can’t do that without automation and AI.

AI enters the Games

“It’s a huge amount of content to manage and to create and customise highlights for different countries, different athletes, different sports, for different platforms for social media, for vertical videos, and so on,” he says. “It is giving our rights-holding broadcasters a lot of capacity too.”

Automated highlights will be produced for 14 sports in Paris. Many of the algorithms it will use have been trained by OBS almost from scratch.

“It’s important to understand that AI systems do exist for the main sports like football and tennis. The difficulty for us is to create credible systems for many sports that are not as popular,” adds Exarchos.

Read more: Multi-format shoulder programming takes Centre Court at Wimbledon

These AI systems pull data live from a sports commentary, auto-tag video and create automated summaries to assist OBS’ editorial teams.

Another AI-based analytics system will produce feedback in real time on audience engagement to keep editorial better informed on what type of content to focus on.

For the first time, OBS will employ AI to generate highlights “very fast, in different formats, whether for traditional TV, for social media, vertical feeders, horizontal videos and for all sports,” says Exarchos. “We do not allow AI systems to auto-publish stories but it helps us a lot in identifying all the elements that make up good stories for posting to social media.”

AI is also being used to generate faster, more relevant, and insightful data during the Games. This includes stroboscopic analysis across diving, athletics and artistic gymnastics to enable fans to better understand the movements and biomechanics of the athletes.

Cloud and remote expansion

The use of cloud services, in partnership with Alibaba, “has exploded,” he says, leading to a 279% increase in cloud consumption between Tokyo and Paris.

When Olympic rights holders started using data centres in Beijing 2018, “some broadcasters were very sceptical” about whether cloud could be used for HD. This year the source format is UHD HDR immersive 5.4.1 sound and the majority of transmission will be hosted in the cloud.

“It has gone beyond all expectations we had. It is now a very mature system. All broadcasters are convinced and they are using it heavily.”

This has allowed for a reduction in the physical space and energy used at the International Broadcast Centre (IBC), with a projected 44% decrease in energy consumption compared to Tokyo. This reduction aligns with the broader goals of making the Games more efficient and environmentally friendly.

The Virtual Outside Broadcasting (VOB) system, developed in collaboration with Intel, allows for remote production and flexible live signal distribution. This approach further reduces the physical footprint and power demands at venues.

In Paris, OBS is deploying VOB for coverage of judo, wrestling, tennis and shooting, after extensive testing during the Youth Olympic Games in Gangwon where half of the entire host operation was remote. Many of the traditional processes that would have been performed in Gangwon, like master control, distribution to broadcasters, graphics creation, and editing were actually done at OBS’ HQ in Madrid.

“This obviously leads to very significant savings, and significant help for the local organisers,” says Exarchos. “It means we have fewer people on the ground. They need less support, less logistics, less transport, less accommodation. It’s the way to the future.”

But this doesn’t mean that everything can or should happen remotely. “There are many things that should be happening in the host city, especially everything that has to do with the interaction of athletes and, the production of shows that have to do with the city. But it’s pointless for us to be shipping containers around the world with equipment and bringing people to do something that they could be doing back home.”

Opening ceremony

When more than 10,000 athletes and dancers parade 3.5km down the Seine on 92 boats it will be covered by upwards of 1000 cameras making it by some estimates the largest televised event in history.

Samsung is equipping each country’s boat with a Galaxy S24 Ultra smartphone to share onboard footage via an exclusive 5G network powered by Orange. This technology integration will also be used during the Olympic sailing competition.

Read more: Paris 2024: Dynamic studios and multilingual reporting to deliver games to 47 markets