Broadcast
The countdown to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games is on the last lap. With eight months to go until the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games, host broadcaster Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) is all set to score a number of firsts by producing more content than ever before and taking the Games further into the digital era.
OBS will break its own records by producing 75 live feeds, more than 9,500 hours of live coverage and 10,000 short-form clips for the Olympics plus approximately 1,300 hours for the Paralympics. The combined events are expected to be the most watched Games in history across all platforms – broadcast, digital and mobile.
Underpinning it all will be a cloud-based infrastructure, by all accounts the largest ever built for broadcast, which is set to transform Olympics coverage next year and far beyond.
Since 2001 the Olympic organisation managed to grow its global audience at successive games with a formula built on a massive hosted outside broadcast. This centred on a huge temporary media centre built in components, tested, and shipped to the host city and assembled.
This included galleries for production of the official broadcast feed and space for rights holding broadcasters to book and build their own custom studios and edit suites. Fleets of OB facilities would be freighted to the venues with signals contributed by satellite to the centre outside of which was a temporary satellite farm for distribution of finished feeds. OBS would store as much material as they could on servers within the media centre for rights holders to plunder and produce their own packages.
The main downside was cost, which still required broadcasters to send hundreds of staff to operate many miles from home over many weeks, and the limited ability to manage and distribute the multiple camera coverage.
From 2020, this resource intensive, creatively restrictive OB operation is being replaced by one that is ideally more fleet of foot but lighter in footprint.
The IBC is still the operational hub but one linked to the OBS Cloud, a data centre comprised of Intel servers with network connectivity managed by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.
According to OBS, cloud broadcasting “will accelerate the digital transformation of traditional TV broadcasting.” The solution, it says, “moves labour-based production efforts into the cloud for processing, improves the efficiency of broadcasting while reducing the cost and enables content creation innovation.”
That’s quite a list but it matches the promises made for the wider transformation of sports coverage from on-site equipment and personnel to virtualised (software-based) remote produced workflows.
Olympic rights holders will be able to make cost savings by keeping elements of production at home, accessing live feeds from OBS Cloud.
“You’re going to see a lot more done from Europe, especially with the number of feeds coming back,” Dave Schafer, SVP content and production, Discovery told a SportsPro event earlier this year. “Our footprint on site will probably be more content-based, to go out and tell those stories.”
For the 2018 Winter Olympics, Discovery still fielded 1000 people in PyeongChang but had a 1200 team back in Europe, a ratio it believes was a tipping point in the company’s transformation.
The switch to a more economically and environmentally sustainable broadcast infrastructure in 2020 will only be the start. The IBC is still built with 350 containers shipped to Tokyo albeit with some of its panel modules and cables recovered from the previous Games’ operation.
There will still be OB trucks at venues around Tokyo but there will also be a 5G network laid by telco NTT DoCoMo for contributing video as a replacement to fibre and satellite in an extension of workflows first trialled in PyeongChang. This will principally be used for 8K to VR live streams.
2020 lays the groundwork for a new broadcast model which will see more and more workflows relocated to the cloud over successive Games. Alibaba’s commitment to the IOC runs through 2028 and not coincidentally includes the Winter Games Beijing 2022.
Data centric
Cloud-based workflows are also allowing OBS to introduce more data-heavy applications to enhance presentation. Chief among them is a sports AI platform developed by Intel for use in the run up to and during the Games.
Instead of using wearable sensors, the 3D Athlete Tracking Technology (3DAT) uses information from multiple standard cameras which provide different angles of the athletes as they train, processed in Alibaba’s cloud.
“It’s a first of its technology using AI and computer vision to enhance the viewing experience,” explains OBS CEO Yiannis Exarchos. “3DAT extracts the form and motion of athletes from multiple 4K cameras and leverages advanced pose estimation algorithms to transform that into insight for broadcast overlay.”
It will for example, help viewers better understand the different phases of a 100m race.
Millennial reach
The move to the cloud is essential for the IOC and its media partners since both want to reach more people, younger audiences especially, across more channels by gaining access to virtually unlimited material from the Games.
Discovery is taking this further than most. It will dovetail the OBS Cloud with its own ambitious remote production build out across Europe in what will be the first serious test of the value of the Euros1.3 billion it spent acquiring pan-European Olympic rights until 2024.
Eurosport Cube, an AR-based analysis tool which debuted in PyeongChang, will return. The graphics give the appearance of putting presenters inside the sport and is a key to making niche sports like softball, sport climbing and surfing relevant to audiences.
Via SVOD Eurosport Player, it intends to offer “every minute” of the Games with live coverage of every event supplemented with personalised and tailor-made content.
It will also publish to a range of social media including on Twitter with live streams of the opening and closing ceremonies and highlights throughout the event in return for in-stream sponsorships sold by Discovery, Eurosport and Twitter (Twitter has a separate Tokyo 2020 deal with NBCUniversal which includes live streaming of bespoke NBCU-produced 20-minute show).
Eurosport’s Olympics clips in the UK will be subject to a three-hour delay due to the terms of Discovery’s existing sublicense agreement with the BBC.
While Discovery and the Olympic movement desire to extend their reach online, TV is still the biggest platform. Of the nearly two thirds of Europe’s entire 700 million population Discovery claim watched some part of its Winter coverage the bulk of 4.5 billion video views were on TV.
Jean-Briac Perette, president and chief executive of Discovery said, “While there is so much talk about digital, the reality is that the primary driver and still the king in terms of delivering this audience, is traditional television.”
Resolution shifts up a gear
Tokyo will be the first Games covered in UHD 4K High Dynamic Range (HDR) which should enhance the viewing experience by bringing a greater level of detail, sharpness and colour even to HD sets.
8K is likely to play a larger but still niche role in the 2020 Games. OBS will produce live and on-demand coverage in 360 8K VR of track and field, boxing, beach volleyball, gymnastics and the opening/closing ceremonies in an extension of trials at the PyeongChang winter games. It’s not clear which rights holder, if any since free to air broadcasters dominate, will have the 5G capacity to distribute this stream in full 8K.
State broadcaster NHK has recorded key events in its 8K format stretching back to London 2012 and plans to produce and broadcast 8K coverage of the 2020 Games over its domestic Super-Hivision channel.
While many analysts are sceptical that 8K broadcast content will ever take off outside of Japan, Italian pubcaster Rai aims to become the first European broadcaster to do so when it kicks off a UHD 4K and 8K service, starting with the Olympics.
Japanese vendors have led the field in developing 8K broadcast technology and will take the opportunity to showcase kit in Tokyo. Panasonic has timed commercial rollout of its 8K Organic Sensor technology at the Games. Among its advantages is a Global Shutter that will make for sharper images of fast-moving objects.
Esports, AI and outer space
Esports will inch closer to becoming an accepted Olympic sport at Paris 2024 with the Intel World Open hosted at Zepp DiverCity, Tokyo just ahead of next year’s Games. Players will compete in Street Fighter V and Rocket League – although for an un-Olympic commercial prize pool of U$500k. The tournament format mimics the Games with national qualifying rounds feeding into national team qualifying rounds, the seven best of which plus Japan will compete in the finals.
The Games will go stratospheric when a pair of Japanese astronauts broadcast messages to cheer on the Olympic torchbearers direct from the International Space Station (ISS). In addition, a specially commissioned satellite will launch from the ISS next spring to orbit the earth with robotic versions of the Games’ mascots.
Even the event’s official theme music is generated by AI. Composer Kevin Doucette feed thousands of melodies into Intel’s AI software and used a selection of the tunes processed by the algorithm to form the basis of the anthem.
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