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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 Excharcos. “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.
Cr. Olympic Broadcasting Services
“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.
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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