Live from PyeongChang: OBS CTO Sotiris Salamouris on the Challenge of the Winter Games and the Promise of Technology Use of 5G, Expanded 4K and 8K Production Move the Olympics Forward By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Tuesday, February 13, 2018 - 5:37 pm
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The Winter Olympics are in the midst of week one and it's already been a challenging one as two consecutive days of alpine events had to be rescheduled due to high winds. And for the team at Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) and the dozens of rights holders on site the changing plans has required juggling of schedules, personnel, and technical facilities. But Sotiris Salamouris, OBS, chief technology officer, says preparing for such occurrences is part of the Winter Games DNA.
OBS CTO Sotiris Salamouris and his team continue to embrace new technologies, like 5G wireless, to improve the production and technical services that are at the core of the Winter Olympics production
While the Winter Games are smaller than the Summer the possibility of cancellations and delays are much higher than the Summer Games and it can wreak havoc with the schedule, he says. The only way to deal with these sort of changes is to have the resources available to be able to adapt and to use technology to help.
The challenge of handling cancellations and delays is not only about coming up with another plan for the production of the event. It's also about making sure that all of the downstream processes, like the apps and other ways content is distributed is also instantly aware to reflect a new reality.
Digital platforms have to be accurate as to when things start and stop, and we use that information to drive not only the apps but encoders, switchers, and more so when we make changes they have to propagate to all of those different applications.
The OBS Broadcast Data Feed area continues to expand within the IBC as data becomes more central to all Olympic activities.
What happened this week with the alpine event exemplifies the powerful role data and metadata feeds play within the entire Olympic operations process. And it is one of the reasons the Broadcast Data Feed (BDF) technical area in the Olympic International Broadcast Centre (IBC) continues to expand in size and scope. Data powers everything from graphics creation to archiving and then for broadcasters to more easily find the most relevant content for their needs both at the games and in the years to come.
The BDF is more prominent in our operations and it's not just audio and video but data and metadata that are part of the product delivered to the broadcasters, he says. It has all of the details about the sports like the results, the start lists, the logs, bios and everything we know about the games.
A Pre-Fab IBC
The center of the Olympic production efforts is an IBC that measures 36,000 square meters and Salamouris says that as of last week every square meter was snatched up by a rights holder as it is home to the production efforts for not only OBS, which creates the host feeds for all of the events, but nearly four dozen rights holders.
More than 45 Olympic rights holders are calling the IBC home for the Winter Olympics.
It is from the IBC that OBS will deliver more than 5,000 total hours of coverage, including 850 hours of live event coverage from PyeongChang. It will take a team of more than 4,000 OBS staff to create that content and deliver it to rights holders via 20 HD multilateral feeds (all with discrete Surround Sound and stereo audio), 7 UHD multilateral feeds, and nine multi-clip feeds that feature highlights, press conferences, and more.
In addition, there are more than 7,000 accredited rights holder personnel from 67 countries onsite in PyeongChang. Forty-five of those rights holder organizations have a presence in the International Broadcast Center (IBC), the largest of which are NBC and, new this year, Eurosport.
The 2018 Olympics marks the second Games where OBS has used a fully modular and pre-built building for the IBC, ending the need to build an IBC from scratch. Sotiris says it allows OBS to not only amortize the costs of the building over a few games but also meets the growing need for organizations to be more environmentally friendly and sustainable. The IBC walls, floors, and other physical structure is shipped in about 300 sea containers with an additional 80 including the core technical infrastructure that powers the IBC.
And while there is plenty of talk about rights holders keeping production teams home there are still plenty of personnel and facilities on site.
The IBC is not only home to the operations for those rights holders but also provides a massive technical hub for OBS. More than 900 kilometers of cable tie everything together and allow for the optimal exchange of content between OBS and the rights holders.
New Tenants
Eurosport's Cube studio, which allows for talent to be placed in an AR environment, is part of the broadcaster's new presence in the IBC.
One big change in the IBC is a new face to the IBC landscape: Eurosport which snagged the rights for all of Europe and is transforming the way Olympic content is being delivered across the continent. Previously Eurovision was the main gate keeper for Olympic broadcast rights across Europe, but it was primarily a member-based organization. Eurosport's presence is different as it is single broadcaster with its own commercial objectives and also a large number of sublicensees like ARD/ZDF, the BBC, ORF, RAI, and more. Eurosport's presence in the IBC, for example, includes separate control rooms for countries like Sweden and Norway in order to deliver more nation-specific coverage.
It's nice and exciting to have Eurosport here as they come with new ideas that are refreshing because they deal with more digitally driven broadcasti
