Paris 2024: Inside Look at OBS Plans for 11,000 Hours of Games Coverage The effort ranges from the largest live-TV effort ever to personal Athlete Moments By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Wednesday, July 17, 2024 - 8:00 am
Print This Story
The Paris Olympics are less than 10 days away, and, for the team at OBS and the thousands of sports-production professionals descending on Paris, it's time to make sure all systems are go for everything from the Opening Ceremony, which will be the largest live-TV effort ever (with more than 1,000 cameras expected to be capturing it), to the 329 events to be played in Paris and beyond.
The Paris 2024 Summer Games Opening Ceremony on July 26 promises to be a showstopper.
OBS expects to produce more than 11,000 hours of content around the Games, with upwards of 4,000 hours of sports and ceremony coverage and 2,350 hours of additional content available to rightsholders via the multi-clip feed (MCF). With 72 native UHD contribution multilateral feeds, 28 MCF feeds, 81 UHD distribution feeds (and 82 HD feeds) produced via 47 production units out of 70 production galleries, the effort is immense and the largest Olympics effort ever.
OBS has three distinct goals for the Paris Games. To capture the distinct city feel of Paris, with iconic locations and landmarks providing a scenic backdrop for broadcast. To use technology for the benefit of storytelling, with increased access to data enabling more-immersive coverage for all distribution platforms and all ways of consuming media. To further push to achieve gender-balanced coverage: for the first time ever, an equal number of men and women will be participating.
At the core of OBS's efforts is an internal staff of approximately 160 representing 28 nationalities. The group will oversee an army of 8,300 OBS games-time personnel from more than 110 countries. The team has relocated from its Madrid headquarters to Paris and has been hard at work setting up the 40,000-sq.-meter International Broadcast Centre in four halls at Paris Le Bourget Exhibition Centre and the 36 venue compounds. The IBC is the center of production efforts and signal acquisition and distribution not only for OBS but also for more than 30 media-rights holders (MRHs) and 100 broadcast organizations, who took possession of spaces there in May. The IBC was operational as of June 26.
OBS continues efforts to reduce the footprint of IBC and venue operations. The Tokyo 2020 footprint, for example, was 23% smaller than the Rio 2016 footprint, and this year's IBC is 13% smaller than Tokyo (space across 36 venue compounds is down 11%). Deployment of OBS Cloud has enabled significant reductions in physical-space and power requirements. As a result, Paris 2024 saves space and infrastructure and, with certain venue optimizations, offers additional opportunities for ticket sales.
Numbering 160 people, the internal OBS team will be at the center of production and technical operations for the Paris 2024 Olympics.
In addition, new workflows, along with the introduction of more remote-production options, have helped MRHs reduce resources and personnel requirements without lessening the quality of the OBS coverage or services to the MRHs.
Efforts to reduce power demand have also worked. Olympic Committee-provided power will be down 44% from Tokyo, and venue broadcast power will be down 29%.
While OBS has been hard at work building out the IBC and other facilities around Paris, it has been gathering plenty of pre-Games content, including aerial footage and Paris landmarks. This footage was made available for the MRHs to use in their promotional programming.
A Historic Opening Ceremony Four customized camera boats will help cover a unique Opening Ceremony for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Next week's Opening Ceremony will be the first ever to be held outside of a stadium. The parade of athletes will take place on the Seine, with 200 Olympic teams transported more than 3.5 miles on more than 80 boats. It will be the largest broadcast production at an Olympic Games in terms of broadcast equipment and resources, and new technology and camera systems have been developed (OBS participated in an operational test, organized by Paris 2024, last July). Four custom-made stabilized boats, fitted with specifically designed camera systems will be at the center of the efforts, and 100-plus camera systems (three times the number of cameras used at Tokyo 2020) will include drones, robos, cranes, and cable cams. Also, look for more than 200 mobile phones to be deployed on the athletes' boats.
Extending beyond the IBC, the OBS presence comprises TV-studio facilities in the Place du Trocad ro and stand-up positions across the city. Also, in collaboration with Paris 2024 and French authorities, OBS has developed a provisional production plan for aerial coverage of the Games: up to 12 beauty cameras, highlighting the most iconic images of Paris, are planned to be installed.
Production Philosophy OBS's production efforts are based on the goal of delivering clear, objective coverage of all Olympic sports. International TV and radio signals or world feeds are delivered to rightsholders via the Multi-channel Distribution Service (MDS). At that point, rightsholders complement the feed with their own images, interviews, data, analysis, and commentary.
These guiding principles drive OBS coverage: improve the quality of the production and the level of service to broadcasters; use technology for the benefit of storytelling with more athlete-centric coverage and immersive solutions; make content more accessible and scalable (supporting remote operations and digital production); and increase efficiencies in workflows and tools, allowing OBS to do more with less and in smarter, more cost-efficient ways.
On the delivery and technology side, OBS will
