Eurosport - The Olympic Broadcaster in Europe

Eurosport - The Olympic Broadcaster in Europe posted: 20/02/2018

The 2018 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, feature 92 nations taking part in 102 events across 15 sports

In 2015 a landmark deal signed in Switzerland saw Discovery Communications and Eurosport acquire most European multiplatform broadcast and distribution rights for the four Olympic Games between 2018-2024. The agreement, worth 1.3 billion Euros, covers all platforms - TV, online and mobile phone across 48 countries.

Now three years later Eurosport is presenting itself as The Olympic Broadcaster . Since February 9, Eurosport is bringing exclusive coverage of the Olympic Winter Games from PyeongChang to 48 markets across Europe - marking a world-first with a single media company taking responsibility for such a huge share of the global audience, about 750 million people to be precise! Part of the unique offering is the commitment to achieve that through technological innovations, transformative partnerships, and an all-screen strategy.

Eurosports All-Screen Approach

With real-life storytelling Eurosport is delivering the ultimate Olympic Games viewing experience, enabling audiences to enjoy every minute of live action from PyeongChang 2018, whenever and on whatever device they choose to watch it. From South Korea to Germany, Sweden, to Norway and Finland and to the United Kingdom, a total of 17 studios across the world are playing host to Eurosport's cast of 150 winter sports experts and adding the local view on the events in PyeongChang.

Eurosport Broadcast Operation at the IBC in PyeongChang

Eurosport's unique Winter Olympics game plan

More than 85 racks of equipment were installed in the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) in PyeongChang. All the equipment is provided by NEP. All of the venue equipment has arrived in pre-staged flight-cases and was up and running as expected. Eurosport is broadcasting the Olympics in 42 languages, this itself makes the whole project incredibly.

To gain another perspective on the scale of the operation, Eurosport deploys around 900 personnel in South Korea, while a further 1,275 are working on the Games content at the various production sites around Europe.

Eurosport Studio in PyeongChang

Remote Production: Virtual Studio Manager

In PyeongChang Eurosport has its own unilateral cameras at all events to allow its directors to cut into the coverage provided by OBS. The cameras are placed at mixed zones, announce points and the commentary positions. In addition, Eurosport has a studio on the roof of the IBC which provide some amazing views of the mountains. Plus, of course, there are studios at some of the venues.

Eurosport is carrying out remote production, both from the IBC and right back at European sites. The overarching control system - the IP-based Virtual Studio Manager (VSM) from Lawo - means anyone in any location can select any piece of video and any piece of audio and talk to any commentary position at any time. In Europe that will operate over four 10 Gigabit circuits. In addition, there is the Eurosport WAN (Wide Area Network) which links all production sites.

Lawo V_Remotes controlled and monitored by VSM, ready to send and receive over 260 Video & Audio streams to-from all the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics venues

The Network is using JPEG encoding to reduce the latency, especially for remote production. Also the ingest point for the cloud-based MAM in Oslo has 50gig capacity to ensure the speed of transfer. When something is recorded in Korea Eurosport gets it out very quickly into the European cloud-based MAM.

In addition to the studio-based production, Eurosport has 60 ENG crews collecting content from around the Games. Editing is carried out both in South Korea and at the various European facilities. Twenty edit suits are used on location with a total of one Petabyte of storage being available.

Eurosport Norway has a dedicated production-control room to tailor content for Norwegian fans

A large EVS system is linked to the Adobe Premiere suites in PyeongChang. Working alongside that is an Avid Interplay system in Paris. Every piece of content that is shot on location is available on the cloud-based management system for anyone working for Discovery.

Eurosport's Massive Production Effort in PyeongChang

Eurosport's Broadcast Operations Centre at the IBC is the nerve centre for the channel's coverage of the Games. There are production teams focused not only on the content that is delivered across all of Europe but also dedicated teams for a number of nations that create more nation-specific content. And the efforts extend back to Europe as well, both to Eurosport's facility in Paris and beyond.

Highlight Editing with EVS

However, to ensure the widest possible audience has access to the various sports, Discovery distributes a minimum of 100 hours of the Olympic Winter Games across European free-to-air broadcasters. This is delivered by more than 30 partnerships with the biggest and best free-to-air national broadcasters.

NOS in the Netherlands, Rai in Italy, ARD and ZDF in Germany, RTE in Ireland and others across much of Eastern Europe have inked deals with Eurosport. It separately struck a long-term deal with the BBC, which already have the rights to a number of Games. Discovery airs the exclusive rights in a number of major markets where it has a free-to-air presence, including in Spain via its D-Max channel, and across parts of Scandinavia.

Live on Location

The Eurosport team has been on site in PyeongChang for months and one of the keys was to establish a relationship with OBS, the host broadcaster for the games and to establish the first steps towards the implementation of the concept of remote production, whereby the production team is physically removed from the studio or venue. This i

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