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Autumn 2021 p80-83 https://online.bright-publishing.com/view/119847937/80/
The Olympics has long been a made for TV event. The Tokyo
Games specifically was planned as a made for digital and millennial event long
before Covid came to town. New sports (Skateboarding, Sport Climbing, Surfing)
and a panoply of mobile-first and on-demand content are intended to bring
younger audiences into the Olympic movement.
Core to the IOC’s agenda over the next five years is to
“Grow digital engagement with people” and since 70% of all IOC revenue is
derived from broadcast rights sales it is the ability of broadcast partners to
reach youth audiences which is vital for its continued relevance.
“Our ambition is to bring the magic of the athletes’ achievements
to the world on an unprecedented scale,” says Yiannis Exarchos, CEO of host
broadcaster OBS in an official guide. “Technology is going to play a critical
role and allow us to bring fans ‘inside the venue’ virtually. The IOC and OBS
believe these new digital innovations will leave a legacy which we will build
on at future editions of the Olympic Games.”
The IOC began dedicating more effort into streaming and
digital content a decade ago. Many of these initiatives have come into their
own at Tokyo 2020. OBS has also been aware of broadcaster needs to remote
produce in order to save costs, and to cut down on its own carbon footprint,
for some time.
For all these reasons, when the Games were postponed, OBS
said there was no need to make any reductions to its original production plan.
If anything, its output has been used to greater extent than ever before.
With broadcasters deciding to take fewer personnel than
planned to Japan, and with the IOC placing further restrictions on the number
of foreign crew (only one rights holder camera-operator allowed in the mix-zone
not a camera-op plus sound op and producer, for example), coverage from Tokyo
relied heavily on material captured by OBS.
The official host feed is broadcast for the competitive
action but it is the behind-the-scenes interviews, team camp clips and local
city colour which rights holders have been restricted from capturing – but
which OBS has been pouring into a media archive it calls Content+.
Most of the 9000 clips in Content+ are intended for web and
social platforms, which is 30% more than for Rio in 2018, and deliberately
filmed on smartphones to feed mobile consumption.
Discovery, which paid Euro1.3 billion for pan-European
rights for Games between 2018 and 2024, has gone further. It managed to place
remote operated cameras in select athlete villages to facilitate safe-distanced
interviews.
NBC has a pact with Twitter to produce “game-ified
activations” and bespoke athlete interviews as well as Primetime Sidecasting
during which Twitch creators commentate on NBC’s live broadcast on a second
screen app.
Cloud and atmospheres
OBS also had in place various cloud-based solutions allowing
broadcasters access to all the content it produced. The main OBS media server
is hosted in a cloud run by Chinese firm Alibaba, enabling rights holders to
access media, rough edit and download multiple formats and profiles.
It is not clear how many broadcasters did in fact use this
with some of the biggest – like NBC – perhaps feeling that cloud is not quite
ready for live primetime.
“In terms of broadcasting, it is still relatively early days
in the full change to cloud technology, and Tokyo 2020 will mark a first step,”
Exarchos admitted. “The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics may then become a
facilitator for its wider use.”
While OBS’ coverage remains largely undiminished, the
complete lack of spectators in venues was an outcome it didn’t anticipate.
Plans to replace crowd atmospheres with clapping and cheers made by OBS crews
themselves while the action is happening came together at the very last minute.
Artificial noise and CG crowds of the type used to augment some sports last
summer were discarded as too complicated (and inauthentic) to introduce so late
in the day.
Also vastly reduced if not altogether abandoned were
technologies aimed at giving spectators a more immersive experience. This
includes wearable glasses at the swimming delivering AR graphics over 5G; a
multi-angle video feature available to golf fans at the Kasumigaskei Country
Club, also delivered over 5G; and a 50-metre wide screen broadcasting 12K
resolution footage of the sailing events that spectators have traditionally
watched from nearby piers with binoculars.
Data rich analysis
“While the ambiance within the venue certainly enhances the
broadcast of the Games, it does not define it,” defends OBS marketing.
“Athletes will always be at the heart of our coverage and conveying their
emotional journey to the fans at home is at the forefront of all our efforts.”
To that end, the use of data from athletes and equipment
(like bikes, yachts) to enhance coverage is extensive. One of these innovations
is an AI-powered 3D athlete tracking technology developed by Intel and Alibaba.
Claimed as a first-of-its-kind use of AI and computer vision, it captured
sprint athletes’ performances from four pan-tilt mounted cameras in the Olympic
Stadium. OBS turn the data into visual overlays to show viewers different
aspects of performance, such as each runner’s sprinting speed curve and the
exact moment each sprinter reached their top speed.
For sport climbing, OBS has created a 3D representation of
the holds and walls. AR technology is used to switch between the live camera
shots and the virtual, as well as generating virtual data about wall’s varying
angles and routes.
Another data addition, focusses intimately on the
performance of archers. This includes cameras tightly trained on their faces to
analyse the slightest change of skin colour generated by any contraction of
blood vessels. Their heart beats are monitored too and translated graphically
on-screen. Such biometrics stats could be widened to other sports in Beijing.
Also trialled at Tokyo were a series of AI-led workflows.
This included an Automatic Media Description (AMD) pilot based on image
recognition from an athlete’s bib to speed turnaround of automatic searching
and clipping. By Beijing 2022, OBS is aiming to expand this process to as many
sports as possible and to open the service to rights holders.
Guillermo Jiménez, OBS Director of Broadcast Engineering,
explains: “We could customise the automatic content offering based on user
preferences, whether by National Olympic Committee, athlete or sport. It means
that, instead of broadcasters searching for content, content will be
automatically pushed to them.”
OBS has certainly not been knocked off course in its
ambition to deliver virtually all host coverage in 4K UHD (some super-slo mo
cameras are not yet upgraded to UHD and some of the tennis event was HD only).
The master signal includes High Dynamic Range which dramatically improves
overall picture quality.
Arrays of up to 80 robotic PTZ 4K cameras were placed at
venues hosting gymnastics, athletics and BMX freestyle. The feeds were stitched
together to create replay clips (claimed turnaround of under five seconds) to
create an effect similar to the bullet-dodging sequences in The Matrix.
Remote presentation
The biggest impact of the pandemic fell on broadcasters
rather than OBS. The continuing uncertainties around travel and growing
Japanese concern over allowing foreigners into the country has curtailed
efforts to present live from Tokyo.
That’s not to say that no presentation is taking place
locally. Far from it. The property is too valuable to NBC which paid $4.4
billion for the rights to cover the Olympics in the US through 2020 (and
another $7.75 billion for rights between 2021 and 2032). It is remote producing
the presentation of sports like diving, golf and tennis back in the US but is
still producing its coverage of gymnastics and athletics (at which the States
excel) plus unilateral coverage of the Games 1600 people in Tokyo.
“It’s not like we all work together every day,” explains
David Mazza, SVP and chief technical officer, NBC Sports Group and NBC
Olympics. “We’re taking a whole bunch of finicky kit halfway round the world,
setting it up in a hurry and getting 1200 freelancers who arrive just a week
before the Games up to speed on how to operate it. Then having it run at peak
performance on the night of the opening ceremony and for the 16-day marathon
after that. I tell our staff, lots of stuff is going to go wrong. Work the
problem, don’t look back. Fix it and get back on the air.”
For Discovery the Summer games is a huge deal too. It wants
to drive subscribers to the Discovery+ app which launched in January and is
doing so in part by having wrap-around coverage across Europe (it sub-licences
to the BBC in accordance with IOC wishes) and with a giant multi-storey virtual
set it calls the Cube. Of course, it’s only giant because it is virtual – built
in Unreal Engine – but affords tremendous presentational possibility. It is
actually a relatively small and unremarkable looking green screen space at
Stockley Park, West London rendered into interactive 3D and based on an initial
physical design by White Light.
“Remote production is now an essential part of sports
broadcast and technology like the Cube allows us to bring back the action from
anywhere,” says Scott Young, senior VP of Content and Production, Discovery
Sports. “Our desire is to push the tech to the absolute limits. That means
advancing the flexibility of the set-up, the interactive nature of the virtual
graphics, the design of the environment by working with suppliers from the
gaming world who can develop at the same pace we can think.”
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