Beijing 2022 Reflections: OBS CTO Sotiris Salmouris Discusses 5G, Virtualized OB Vans, and Other Innovations By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Tuesday, March 8, 2022 - 9:45 am
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The Beijing Paralympics conclude later this week and that conclusion marks a difficult effort undertaken by the team at Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) and rightsholders around the globe to juggle COVID protocols, production workflows, and technical innovation. Sotiris Salamouris, CTO of OBS, and his team oversaw a number of new innovations at this year's games and he discussed them with SVG late last week.
I wanted to roll through some of the technologies and get your thoughts on how things went. Let's start with 5G that was used at the alpine events. How did that work out?
Sotiris Salamouris, OBS, CTO
It went really well. We were more aggressive with using 5G than we were in Tokyo where it was essentially a couple of cameras that supported the opening ceremony operations. But in Beijing we deployed close to 30 cameras on 5G, some of them fully live and some of them that I would call near live ENG.
For the alpine events it proved helpful for areas that were difficult to reach and we used it in two or three handheld camera locations along the course in parallel to our legacy RF systems that work in COFDM. We had bit rates of around 40 Mbps doing 5G which is higher than the typical COFDM system which is usually around 30 Mbps. So, we were able to get an increase in terms of overall quality.
Another good use case was at the opening ceremony where there are always some unknown factors and last minute surprises from the creative team. There were some changes in the fireworks that we found out a couple of weeks before the show and [we needed to change a camera position]. But with the closed-loop management system for the Games we could not really engineer any of our more standard solutions, that is to try to get fiber connectivity or establish a dedicated RF link, so we decided to use 5G [to get the signals from the camera] and it worked great. So, we learned that 5G can be deployed at the last minute with excellent quality, very high bit rates, and can be easily integrated with our workflow.
That is really how the technology works very nicely: as a last-minute transmission over an essentially public network that you can integrate into your production.
Do you think 5G could be used to cover an entire alpine course or would there be issues around bandwidth, latency between cameras, etc.?
Well, all of those are addressable problems and the question is what kind of capacity you have and capabilities you have. At the Olympics it's a high-end event and we have far more capabilities than other events might have. So, we do have the capacity to cable very remote locations, and we essentially built a mini fiber network to cover the whole course which is close to 2.5 kilometers in length. But even in our case there are course changes or competition changes that are difficult to accommodate at the last moment and that's where you can use 5G and absolutely rely on it. It allows you to use it as a replacement for a cable camera at the last minute.
For Alpine events, OBS used 5G in handheld cameras locations along the course. (All photos: 2022 Olympic Broadcasting Services)
One problem is you can't plan to use it by yourself, independently. You do need to have a partnership with a telco operator who you can plan with because we are talking about a public network. So, the nice thing is you don't need to do it by yourself, but you do have to consider what kind of quality guarantees you need because you may have spectators and other people that may want to use the same network. But the technology does work, and the bit rates and quality are what we expected.
You mentioned working in the closed loop which was designed to minimize the risk of COVID cases. How did that impact your ability to problem solve for production changes that might occur?
It was complex and it did require a lot of detailed planning by the organizers which they did very thoroughly. I have to give accolades to the whole Organizing Committee and the Chinese authorities for managing this process. They didn't want to have any kind of COVID spread from the people who come from abroad to the population and thus the typical back-of-house locations that we need to have access to were part of the loop. However, within that area we could move very quickly and there were no issues as the bubble included the venues, transfer between venues, and accommodations.
But before that closed loop was established, by the end of January, it is where we were mostly affected because a lot of our installation happens before that. In response, however, the committee set up many mini bubbles in various locations during that period, corresponding to the specific areas of our interest, and we had all the support to do things properly and do our work. But that required a lot of resources from the organizing committee and a lot of coordination.
By the way, during the Olympics we did have a very small crew that was outside of the loop. Among them was the quite important aerial team for all the helicopter coverage as they had to constantly interface with the authorities, the heliport facilities which were out of the loop, etc.
So, shifting back to technology, what were some highlights?
At Tokyo we introduced so many new things like the move to UHD, IP, etc., etc. that it almost looks like in Beijing we didn't do anything new. But this is not really the case as we implemented UHD and HDR plus of course the IP transition to the Winter Games and that is a very different environment as to how it is set up. And proving that those things can work in both environments was innovation number one as for the first we had a full
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Beijing 2022 Reflections: OBS CTO Sotiris Salmouris Discusses 5G, Virtualized OB Vans, and Other Innovations By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
