Live From Tokyo Olympics: OBS CTO Sotiris Salamouris on the Move to UHD, HDR, IP, and Immersive Audio By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Wednesday, August 4, 2021 - 5:46 am
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When the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games ended, OBS CTO Sotiris Salamouris and his team laid out an ambitious vision for the 2020 Tokyo Games. Not only did they want to transition from SDI to IP, but they also wanted to go all UHD and HDR.
It was an ambitious plan, but the team has pulled it off, despite a pandemic-mandated delay that may have allowed more time for testing and development but also meant less time to get ready for the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. Even with multiple years to plan, there is little in the way of wiggle room because there is always another Olympics to plan for, new technology to embrace, and new projects to launch to better meet the needs of rightsholders.
OBS's Sotiris Salamouris inside the OBS Tech Area at the IBC
When the postponement happened, says Salamouris, we already had about 150 people here in Tokyo. It was a project in and of itself just to figure out how to freeze things and then get people back home. We needed to deal with the situation here, coordinate with Beijing, and then also deal with new requirements from broadcasters, who were all concerned with how they would work remotely and their space inside the IBC.
When the Games were delayed by a year, he notes, it gave the team a bit more time to do testing with broadcasters. But the team tried hard not to change the scope of what they were looking to accomplish as it dealt with other issues, including logistical challenges and, of course, the pandemic.
It was difficult, says Salamouris, because, in order to be ready for the event, we have a very well-coordinated plan. And we had two areas of difficulty. One was international logistics, which were also affected by the pandemic with frequent flight changes and cancellations. In addition, as though one bad option was not already enough, sea transports were experiencing challenges due to the overall backlog created by the Suez Canal blockage some time ago.
And then there were pandemic issues, he adds. Because OBS brings thousands of international staff in to work the Games, the Japanese authorities and the Organizing Committee established a thorough regime to safeguard the health and safety of the international personnel and, of course, the local population. This famous playbook mandated rigorous testing and other measures to minimize infection in the Games environment.
Salamouris notes that there were some disruptions in OBS operations. Contact tracing on the plane to Tokyo, for example, required some personnel to quarantine, making them unavailable to work. We had Plan B's to address such eventualities, he says. It is totally impossible to fully predict what kind of impact you may have if someone from your personnel, who have very varying and sometimes unique skillsets, may need to quarantine.
We have the playbook, he continues, and people were tested and tested. The reality was that the percentage of positives found was extremely low. However, there were cases where people may have been in the vicinity of suspicious cases or even positives and then had to quarantine. Suddenly, you have people that are essential to your team disappearing, sometimes for two weeks.
Despite the travails, dozens of rightsholders, thousands of production professionals, and thousands of athletes and volunteers are onsite for the second week of the Tokyo Games. And, although technical innovation may be taking a backseat to the ongoing concerns around COVID-19, it's important to look at some of the innovations that make these Games arguably the single most impressive technical achievement in the history of sports production.
Embracing the Cloud As rightsholders reshaped their plans for the Tokyo Games, the OBS efforts around cloud-based services started to become more important. They became a priority, says Salamouris, as they would allow rightsholders to do more remotely and operate from wherever they are located.
OBS cloud-based services are built on the Alibaba cloud platform, and Salamouris says it would not be easy to do without their support. You need specialized support to do this, and we are able to get Alibaba's attention.
The more popular cloud services include Content , Content Extra, and Live Cloud, although there are several others that OBS had developed over Alibaba's public cloud for either its internal consumption or delivery to the RHBs. All three have become increasingly important because of the pandemic.
We'll produce more than 9,000 hours of content, 5,500 hours of which is live competitions, ceremonies, and other scenes and content from the venues, says Salamouris. The rest is postproduced. The point is, how do we make that accessible to broadcasters?
The two main ways for rightsholders to access all that content is Content and Content Extra, which are basically the same service but with different access rights. Content gives access to all the postproduced content, such as features, interviews, and highlights. A file-based system, it gives the user the ability to download an entire clip or part of it or even do some editing in the cloud.
Content Extra is the same things but with access to growing files for competitions as they are happening, explains Salamouris. You can browse it and clip whatever you want and download it while the session is still on. You can't feed it to distribution, but you can build your own highlights once you select what high-resolution file [is] sent to you.
For rightsholders looking to do cloud-based distribution, there is Live Cloud, which makes all the video and audio signals available via IP packets streamed over the public internet. The whole process
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Live From Tokyo Olympics: OBS CTO Sotiris Salamouris on the Move to UHD, HDR, IP, and Immersive Audio By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
