This Is Not a Test: How OBS Prepped Its Tech for Paris 2024 (Practice, Practice, Practice)

Virtual production, AI and digital outreach are some of the new and expanded innovations delivering comprehensive coverage of the upcoming Paris Olympic Games.

The Youth Olympic Games, hosted in Gangwon, South Korea, served as a fertile testing ground for innovation and experimentation in broadcasting and digital technologies for host broadcaster Olympic Broadcasting Services. 

“We have always looked at the Youth Games as a great opportunity to test things that, potentially later on, we can actually implement in the Olympic Games,” explained OBS CEO Yiannis Exarchos. “It’s very difficult to be testing many things in the summer games; you have to go with very mature technologies. We use the Youth Games as an incubator for innovation.”

The YOG is also an ideal training ground to bed in new digital tech and social media outreach aimed at younger audiences — essential for the main Games, too, if it is to continue to hold relevance.

Exarchos highlighted that the coverage for Gangwon 2024 was 12% more comprehensive than Lausanne 2020, with 170 hours of live coverage. The focus was not only on live sports but also on interviews, athlete stories, and behind-the-scenes content. This approach helps in building a connection with the audience and provides a platform for young athletes to share their journeys.

Localization for a Global Event

It’s also why localization of content is being ramped up. “We know that this gives bigger penetration,” said Exarchos. “It’s not just about showcasing the competition. It’s very much about giving a voice to the young athletes. We interview them, we follow how they prepare, how they train, how they warm up for the event.”

In Gangwon, OBS tested working closer together with 10 local content creators and influencers in addition to 30 other content creators worldwide creating Gangwon-inspired content remotely. 

Coverage here is not necessarily what is going on in the field of play, since that is the responsibility of right holders.

“They were here to tell their own stories, to tell their own experience of the Olympic Games,” said IOC Digital Engagement and Marketing Director Leandro Larrosa.

Digital-First Initiatives

A collaboration with Pinterest brought another creative dimension to the YOG, with content ranging from figure skating makeup tutorials to Olympic-themed nails and winter sports fashion.  

Exarchos also claimed that Olympics.com ended 2023 as one of the strongest sports digital platforms in the world, despite it not being an Olympic year. 

“We’re doing stories specifically targeted for different countries, about athletes of their own countries. So what you see in one country on official Olympics channel Olympics.com, may not necessarily be the same,” Exarchos said.

The Olympic app is the entry point for fans wanting a unique immersive and personalized. Many new features will be available in the app for the first time this summer. 

Testing 1, 2, 3…

For OBS, the thrust of testing is to make production more efficient in a way that can be scaled up for the complexity of a Summer Games.

This effort started at least as far back as 2022’s Beijing Winter Games by beginning to move away from a conventional OB. IP and cloud technology has enabled the transition from production at venues to production based on server systems, which could be anywhere in the world.

Intel is a prime partner to OBS and for whom it supplies compute and store capacity. China’s Alibaba is another; it manages the cloud services for the OBS. 

“It’s a combination of virtualized processes that also uses a lot cloud services,” Exarchos explained. “The system has proven itself very reliable. We will be using it in Paris for the coverage of judo, wrestling, tennis and shooting. We believe that it makes the future of Olympics broadcasting far more efficient and far more sustainable.”

In Gangwon, half of the operation was remote. Many of the traditional processes that would have been performed in the host city, like master control, distribution to broadcasters, graphics creation, and editing were actually done at OBS HQ in Madrid. 

Exarchos said, “This obviously leads to very significant savings, and very significant help for the local organizers. It means we have less people on the ground, they need less support, less logistics, less transport, less accommodation. This is the way to the future.” 

This doesn’t mean that everything can or should happen remotely, he added. “There are many things that should be happening in the host city, especially everything that has to do with interaction of athletes and, 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.”  

AI Enters the Games

The use of AI has seeped into Olympics production in a number of ways.

In Gangwon, OBS tested two workstreams that it believes are “very important” for the larger scale of the Summer Games, for which OBS plan to produce 11000 hours of content in less than three weeks. One workflow concerns automatic highlights generation and the other with AI systems tools for editors.

“It’s a huge amount of content to manage and to create and customize highlights for different countries, different athletes, different sports, for different platforms for social media, for vertical videos, and so on,” Exarchos said.

He explained, “AI has started very credibly producing this capability for us. It is giving our rights holding broadcasters a lot of capacity, too.”

Automated highlights will be produced for 14 different 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 exec said. “The difficulty for us is to create credible systems for many sports that are not as popular.”

AI will assist editors by suggesting which video and audio elements are important to include in stories. The idea is to save editors’ time trawling through mountains of footage and to produce polished videos fast.

These AI systems pull data from a sports’ live commentary. “In a massive, complex and dense event like the Olympic Games, where time is of the essence, this is an incredibly useful tool,” Exarchos pronounced.

Paris will see the use of AI digital production systems that will auto tag video and create automated summaries to further assist editorial. 

Another AI generated analytics system will produce feedback in realtime on audience engagement to keep the editorial teams better informed on what type of content to focus on.

“We’re doing also something similar with AI generated assistance for editors who write and publish stories,” Exarchos added. “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. 

There is pressure to deliver. Larossa said, “Everybody is expecting to clips to social media to be almost instant, right after the live coverage of the competition. That’s where AI is a big help. We’re using Intel powered technology to have this AI live clipping. We will also live stream vertical video to mobiles for the first time ever at this Games.” 

Another semi-automated technology is coverage of the medal celebration. OBS is not just creating one feed but instantly creating and publishing content on all the main social media platforms in multiple different languages.

In Gangwon, for ice hockey, OBS tested an AI operated camera system, but it’s not quite ready for Olympic primetime.

“These technologies not yet mature for the complexity that we have in the Olympic Games,” Exarchos said. “But I think that in a very short period of time, they’ll be quite mature for simpler coverage. It will be extremely cost effective and very, very sustainable in the long term.”

The use of cinematic lenses and 360-degree replays are intended to provide a more cinematic feel to the coverage, enhancing the Games’ visual appeal.

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