The Paris 2024 Olympic Games showcase the latest advances in broadcast technology

This weekend sees the opening of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in which, as usual, the broadcast industry tests its latest technologies. Isidoro Moreno, Head of Engineering of Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), addresses some of the main challenges such as virtual mobile units, XR studio, remote production, cloud technology, UHD, immersive audio...

The entire broadcast technology industry, whatever its place in the production or distribution flow, wants to be part of the Summer Olympics. Few can confirm their participation, apart from a handful of Technological Partners, while each and every one of them shares "confidentially" with their customers and Partners that have been part of this event. "Do you know the underwater camera of swimming? Don't say anything, but it's ours." Who hasn't heard these confessions in the halls of Amsterdam's RAI in the autumn after one of these events?

That one of your solutions becomes used by the production team of OBS, the organisation whose mission is to provide the best possible coverage of the Olympic Games in all its variants (summer, winter, Paralympics, youth...), is a Meta by itself. It implies that this tool is going to be deployed in a Highly demanding environment to be the protagonist of a worldwide coverage. Whether or not that broadcast is personalized by each of the rights-holders, technology will play a fundamental role in both the frontend, capturing the spectacularity of sports and supporting their narration, as in the Backend, with production and distribution processes that are at the forefront of sports production.

Los Paris 2024 Olympic Games, which are held from today, Friday, July 26 to Sunday, August 11, will once again have a mammoth technological deployment which will showcase the latest advances in the universe of broadcast technology. Isidoro Moreno, Head of Engineering at OBS, addresses the philosophy behind the broadcast of the next Olympic Games. OO., previews top-level novelties such as its new Virtual Mobile Units, anticipates a new panorama in which the offshoring it is postulated as a pillar of productions and, in short, anticipates how the Olympic Games will once again shake the game board anticipating Processes and workflows that will mark the industry until, at least, 2028.

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The OBS Mission

Historically, local national television was in charge of the broadcast production of each edition of the Olympic Games. This way of working brought logistical and operational benefits, but it implied a loss of know-how from edition to edition, no matter how many collaborative efforts the engineering teams undertook.

This approach changed around 1992, the year in which Barcelona hosted what is still considered one of the best editions of all time: "Everyone talks a lot about Barcelona. There were important advances in coverage, technology used, new systems or ways of doing production, but a Germinal idea for large events: having a host broadcaster or a division within the Olympic Committee itself that would open a Great international collaboration in which many television stations around the world will provide professionals. And not only engineers, but also producers or filmmakers with a lot of experience in specific sports."

OBS has accumulated a Remarkable track record in the realization of the JJ. OO. which has allowed "to make the best possible television production for the event with the necessary technological and technical means".

According to Moreno, this model worked, although limited by processes such as Knowledge transfer, which made it necessary to "start, in part, from scratch" with each edition of the Olympic Games. OO.. This factor eventually led to the creation of Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), a division wholly owned by the International Olympic Committee that ensures continuity in the quality of coverage and achieves greater efficiency in resources.

Thanks to this mission that began in 2001, OBS has accumulated a remarkable track record in the realization of the Olympic Games. OO. which has allowed "to make the best possible television production for the event with the necessary technological and technical means". "That is our mission, our function and our desire," says the company's head of engineering.

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From Gangwon to Paris: A Crucial Proof of Concept

One of the advantages of OBS accumulating experience, resources and professionals in the broadcast production of the Olympic Games. OO. It is the Consolidation of workstreams. This allows a technology or workflow to be tested on a small scale to ensure its suitability for the next big event on the Olympic calendar: "It happened to us with ultra-high definition in the case of the Pyeongchang 2018 Olympic Winter Games. It was the first time we did 8K and 4K in parallel, a workflow that we consolidated for Tokyo 2020," Moreno recalls.

There are dozens of similar events, on a greater or lesser scale, in each of the Olympic celebrations. At the last Youth Olympic Games, which were held at the beginning of the year in Gangwon (South Korea), the proof of concept for the new OBS virtual mobile unit, defined by Moreno as a "very ambitious, very innovative project that we believe will have a great future".

The new OBS virtual mobile unit arises as a logistical and technological response to the biannual nature of the Olympic Games. OO. In order not to have an unused fixed asset given the spaces between competitions, as well as to be able to enjoy the latest technology, the company had always opted for rental to make its creative and technological vision a reality. This also includes mobile units, vehicles that are offered by international service providers and have a Very varied infrastructure to provide the flexibility to produce all types of content. "Starting from this concept, we came up with an idea. What if instead of having so much material and dedicated hardware, what I do is have standard hardware?" says Moreno.

"The Virtual Mobile Units They allow us to avoid having elements that we do not use and assume their cost, because when moving a mobile unit I also move those resources that we do not use. We don't need. In addition, we can have a Much more efficient service, as we can activate the software Only when we need it”.

To realize its vision, OBS has relied on servers Edge to interconnect the standard hardware of your mobile units with the software of "each of the elements we need" and simulate, in this way, a traditional mobile unit. Moreno believes that this approach has important advantages: "It allows us to avoid having elements that we do not use and assume their cost, because by moving a mobile unit I also move those resources that we do not need. In addition, we can have a Much more efficient service, as we can activate the software only when we need it. We also prevent large mobile units from moving around the world to make them available for the Olympic Games; for Tokyo, we had a lot of European mobile units that were traveling for weeks."

Moreno affirms that this new approach of OBS based on virtual mobile units today "Not much cheaper" than the traditional rental model that the production company has been following, although it has a "much more promising future".

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Is the industry ready for the OBS Virtual Mobile Unit?

Building a virtual mobile unit involves a significant work of Conceptualization and Engineering, as well as requires a sufficiently consolidated offer from the broadcast industry to guarantee virtualized solutions that can operate with solvency in the critical environments in which OBS will operate. This has led Moreno and his team to explore the market and hold dozens of conversations with all kinds of manufacturers, a complex process that has come to fruition: "Most of the elements were already available, but others that we understood were going to be easy have been especially complex. For example We had a hard time finding an audio mixer based on cloud”.

"The project of Virtual Mobile Units What we did in Gangwon 2024, in which we wanted to check in particular whether the delays were reasonable for make it viable in UHD format, worked at the perfection”.

The most critical element, and the one that has cost OBS the most to choose and implement, was the Orchestration System: "We needed software that was able to talk to all the elements, but we didn't find it. In the end, we had to do a mix considerable, since we have many different suppliers and not all of them have the same level of openness for their application," says Moreno, who justifies this lack of supply in the novelty of this production system: "This is going to be a long process, but we believe that it will be standardized, which will make orchestration much simpler in the future."

The proof of concept of the virtual mobile units, launched in Gangwon, met all the expectations of the OBS team. Paris 2024 will be the acid test: "The project we did, in which we wanted to check especially if the delays were reasonable to make it viable in UHD format, worked perfectly."

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11,000 hours of content

Virtual mobile units, together with more traditional production resources and with the capture offered by more than 1000 cameras, will make up a production with more than 11,000 hours of content, of which about 4,500 hours will correspond to live sports production and ceremonies. Everything, so that the rights-holders have the resources they need to convey to viewers the Intrahistory of the competition and help to get to know their athletes: "One of the objectives we have is to interview all the athletes, it doesn't matter if they have medals or not. In this way, we guarantee that each television can have specific content." The narrative is another of the engines that has pushed OBS to redouble its commitment to content. As Moreno comments: "At the Youth Olympics we have been able to interview athletes from 14 to 18 years old who can become multi-medalists. That way we can trace its history."

OBS has worked intensively to generate Automatic part generation processes based on Metadata and inteligencia artificial trained by Machine Learning and always supervised by a operator human.

Beyond the live broadcast of the tests and interviews, OBS will offer Abstracts, images of the Olympic atmosphere, musical montages or informative pieces of the Olympic News Channel. This news, which in Beijing reached 400 news units of between three and four minutes, will be addressed with the usual neutral perspective that accompanies the Olympic competition. But what about those broadcasters who are looking to have specific content focused on their country, a region or a particular athlete?

To address this casuistry, OBS has worked intensively to generate Automatic part generation processes based on Metadata and inteligencia artificial trained by Machine Learning and always supervised by a human operator. "We will give as an option to broadcasters who can parameterize your particular desires; it will be a series of limited desires, but it will allow them to generate content in a very efficient way," explains Moreno. This system, which will have a workflow through "pointers" that allow the duration of each suggested piece to be adapted, does not seek to reduce jobs, but to help create "much more content" that "due to time or human capacity you could miss but that could be very interesting".

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IBC: Less space and energy consumption

At the same time as the hours of coverage of the Olympic Games. OO. of Paris 2024 reach record figures, the IBC (International Broadcast Center) of the competition will be a 13% smaller than Tokyo 2020, as well as consume a 44% less energy. The efficiency, in this way, it is confirmed as one of the key values of the competition; an optimisation of resources that, as Moreno comments, could not have been possible a few years ago: "Technology is giving us more and more options for what we want to do. We are becoming more efficient and we broadcast more by more different methods. We will continue to use satellite, but also fiber optics and even the internet for distribution."

"The IBC is slowly becoming a space closest to that of Office work (…). It doesn't seem so essential to ride anymore large television systems."

The improvements in distribution implemented by the broadcast industry and favoured by the consolidation of the IP world have allowed broadcasters to dispense with transporting large equipment to take advantage of the distribution capabilities offered by the OBS itself: "The IBC is gradually becoming a space closer to office work, in which ENG teams arrive with their computer, edit their particular material, and have the necessary connectivity to distribute content. It no longer seems that it is so essential to set up large television systems."

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The IP in the Paris 2024 broadcast

After the launch of content transport through the IP world at Tokyo 2020, Paris 2024 will once again bet on overcoming the limitations of SDI in parallel to the evolution of the possibilities offered by the Telco world and the first steps of the broadcast world towards this field: "With SDI, the use of bandwidth was not entirely efficient. To make a UHD you needed 12G, but it turns out that the Links communications standard were 10, 40 or 100, multiple that are not necessarily 12G. The IP world allows you to use bandwidth much better," Moreno points out.

The workflow will therefore be similar to the one that was carried out in the Japanese capital: "Since we generated the signal at the sports venue and transmitted it to the IBC, we made a 2022/7 Transport, which allows the same content to be put on two different lines and, in the event that one of the two lines collapses, to recover at destination without loss of packets". Another issue is the delivery of content directly to broadcasters, which will be offered with links both in 12G as in SMPTE ST 2110: "This allows us to make a slower transition, since not all broadcasters transit at the same time."

The delivery of content directly to the broadcasters will be offered with links both in 12G as in SMPTE ST 2110: "This allows us to make a Slower transition, since not all broadcasters transit at the same time”.

For Moreno and his team, it is necessary respond to the needs of each of the broadcasters they serve: "We did the high definition in Barcelona 92, but the televisions really began to adapt to HD around the 2000s and we didn't do complete coverage until Beijing 2008. I also remember how in Sydney 2000 40% of the links were SDI transmission and 60% was analogue. Two years later, in Salt Lake City, the percentages were exchanged, and in Athens 2024 we did everything digital."

"We have a Obligation of retrocompatibility which forces us to ensure that any client can have a format that allows them to do their work correctly. This of course limits us, but on the other hand it is a challenge to be able to meet all needs efficiently. The same thing happens with audio: we make a 5.4.1, but we also make sure that the user can receive the mix perfectly in stereo," says Romero.

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Does the remote make sense in the Olympic Games? OO of summer?

A constant in sports production outside the Olympic Games are the Remote Production Workflows, put to the test in top-level competitions and, in fact, taken on by the company itself OBS in events such as the Youth Olympics. "We have done many small events with a remote production format and 100% of the distribution was remote. We had activities in each venue and we did a Passthrough at the IBC to transmit the signals in our international network and transmit them in Madrid," Moreno clarifies.

This workflow fits with the Youth Games, given that the vast majority of broadcasters are not present with their own deployments in the IBC itself. The case of Paris 2024 will be the opposite: "It doesn't make much sense for us to produce in Paris, send it to Madrid, and return it to Paris so that a man who is at the headquarters of Equestrian has its signs," Moreno explains.

"If you want to do remote production, OBS will provide all the facilities for the broadcaster to access Any Content wherever you are, and decide whether to build your Local, remote, or hybrid”

Despite this, the next Olympic Games. OO. will have Remote Contribution Workflows that will allow each broadcaster to choose the way in which they want to interact with the Feeds OBS officials, as well as Customize your own streams: "We are extending services that were previously impossible, such as having a copy of a camera that you can have at the headquarters of each discipline, at the IBC or directly in your office. This makes the remote level depend on the broadcaster itself. There are some broadcasters who manage their operations remotely, while others decide, either because of economic capacity or because of their own editorial line, to build everything locally."

"Therefore, if you want to do remote production, OBS is going to give all the facilities so that the broadcaster can access any content wherever they are, and decide whether to build their coverage of Local, remote, or hybrid", says the head of engineering about the production company's ability to adapt.

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UHD: standard in Paris... and alternative among broadcasters

The gap between the IPTV world and the offer by traditional broadcasters in terms of UHD extends to Olympic content. The OBS team, as in Tokyo 2020, will bet on a 100% UHD production in 4K HDR resolution, although the Downconversion will continue to be a priority among many of the rights-holders of the next Olympic Games. OO..: "Many of the broadcasters who were interested in the UHD HDR format for Tokyo 2020 ended up broadcasting in 1080p HDR since the jump could be very expensive. We found that there was little interest in UHD; there were far fewer people than we thought. This meant that we made a lot of effort to make a good conversion so that there was compatibility and that even those who had televisions in SDR could watch the competition in the best possible way."

Looking ahead to Paris 2024, OBS is ready to deliver the highest quality content to its clients, although it will not be until the last minute that they will know which is once again the most widespread option among the rights-holders: "Most broadcasters are asking us both HD and UHD. Little by little they are beginning to realize that it is a very big improvement, costs have decreased and, in addition, viewers have changed: if before they were passive and it was the televisions that forced the market to evolve, now they are Asking for the highest quality. The transition may be much faster than expected," Moreno reflects.

The 8K or UHD2 it will also feature new test fields at Paris 2024 with deployments at the ceremonies, 3×3 basketball, the breaking and the tests of skateboarding in its modalities Street and Park. Moreno does not hesitate to highlight the benefits of this format, such as "a great resolution close to the cinema film" or "a spectrum of colour that is close to reality", but acknowledges that its Scope will be very limited due to the shortage of 8K-compatible TVs or the limitations of distribution channels. These resolutions also pose challenges in terms of production: "We don't have 100% of the cameras we want to use in 8K. For example, some mini-cameras either do not have the resolutions, or do not have an adequate transfer mode, since the radio frequency links we use have latencies in the 8K transfer of up to 10 seconds that we cannot accept for live broadcasts".

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Evolving XR with a virtual studio in the Olympic Village

The Showmanship and storytelling options offered by the Extended Reality In the sports field, it has been one of the greatest evolutions in the broadcasting of sports content in recent years. OBS, pioneers in this discipline, will continue to deepen this type of deployment in numerous events, accompanying these graphics deployments with enhancements from the world of AI: "We are trying to get to see the spin of the ping pong ball to show the effects they have. Other elements that we can represent will be Metadata associated with biometric data as long as the corresponding permissions are in place, such as when we capture the heart rate in the archery test. It is not only about having the technology, but we have to take into account some legal limitations."

Within the XR universe, one of the great novelties of OBS offered to its rights-holders involves the development of a Virtual Studio located in the Olympic Village from which remote interviews can be carried out simulating the presence of presenters and athletes. Starting from motion parameters of Camera, Tachometer and Remote Systems, it will be possible to conduct interviews by moving the camera and maintaining proportions, one of the most frequent failures of previous applications of this technique. Moreno explains that the integration of this system will be simple so that broadcasters can have access to the camera parameters and be able to "simulate the render with standard devices".

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Frequencies, 5G and Slicing in Paris 2024

Some of the most challenging coverage of Paris 2024 will be those involving Mobility and locations remote events, whether a marathon or a race is taking place. sailing. Many of the connections will be provided by traditional models, such as frequencies (despite the complexity of their issue), fiber or even satellite connections.

The 5G will play a fundamental role in these broadcasts, but to a certain extent it will not be through the promised capabilities of 5G Slicing, a technology "a bit limited" at present for Moreno. Resilience, as a fundamental value of the broadcasts of the next Olympic Games, has led OBS to rely on 5G, but with the construction of Private Networks: "By setting up a private network, frequency management is much easier, since you are using a certified band and the service will be provided by the operator in the country."

A second benefit in this field will be the management of the 5G network for Prioritizing certain assets as required by each production: "By managing the 5G network privately, we can prioritize certain cameras that we consider to be more important than others." Moreno recognizes that OBS is "Open to all types of technologies that facilitate production", but celebrates the performance of 5G both for its "very flexible" bandwidths representative of the "IP world".

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AI: No turning back

When questioned about those disruptive technologies of vital importance for the coverage of Paris 2024, Moreno does not hesitate to highlight, even above innovations such as his virtual mobile unit or his XR studio, the use of AI in all types of processes. Yes, artificial intelligence and Metadata will be used to promote the personalization of content or generate pieces of interest as a possible world record, but this is only the first of dozens of other applications that will see the light progressively: "We have many open projects: both tools that we will use for disciplines, and other proofs of concept that we will apply in the future".

"We have many Open Projects around the IA: both tools that we will use to Disciplines, like others Proofs of concept that we will apply in the future."

Artificial intelligence will therefore play an important role in the production of content for the next Olympics. OO., but there is also a "not so visible" side that has been vital to OBS's work: the planning. "By using these technologies, we have been able to manage the planning of the Olympic Games. OO. much more efficiently. We used to run a single event and maybe had up to 300 people working on this planning phase. Now there are 160 of us and we simultaneously have Winter Games, Summer Games, Youth Games, the UIC sessions and the Youth Series. This is something that can only be done with tools that help you communicate, share documentation and make decisions in a much more assisted way," Moreno stresses, not only Not resisting change, but recognizing, once again, how technology is capable of doing Impossible Apparent Realities.

A report by Sergio Julián Gómez

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