Live from PyeongChang: Eurosport Olympic Legacy About More Than the Games By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Friday, February 16, 2018 - 7:07 pm
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Eurosport's ambitious plans for the 2018 Winter Olympics are now in day six of being in full operation and John Honeycutt, Discovery Communications, CTO, says that the team has been fantastic and, for the first week of the Olympics, things couldn't be going better. My biggest concern was we would have some issues in the first couple of days and then we would never emotionally get out of that hole, he says. But we had a really strong opening weekend and the viewer numbers coming back from the regions have been spectacular. So, I feel really good about the performance and the team.
David Schafer says the Eurosport efforts for the 2018 Olympics will create a legacy that extends beyond the Olympics.
David Schafer, Discovery Communications, SVP, Olympics Operations & Planning, concurs, adding that the team expected some bumps because Eurosport and the team had never taken on such an ambitious project or really worked together so closely.
We were prepared for any angle and for anything that could go wrong, says Schafer. So, we prepared for those and I think the teams have reacted accordingly. And you can see it on air.
The Eurosport team is a massive United Nations of sports production that ultimately is responsible for delivering the Olympics to 48 countries in 42 languages. Schafer equates it to a U.S. national network having production teams across every state and then each state's team requiring different feeds with different languages.
If you think of it in that regard it is quite complex, he says.
There is a multi-national team in PyeongChang at the IBC and at the venues; another large team in Paris, where Eurosport is headquartered; a team at NEP's Mediabank facility in Oslo that logs and stores all assets and, in turn, makes them available to editors and other production teams across Europe; and then there are Eurosport operations across Europe that giving content a more local flair.
We have 50 Gbps of circuits in Korea, 50 Gbps of circuits back to Europe where signals go through Frankfurt to Paris and then to London where it goes out over the Discovery WAN which is a whole other set of circuits, says Honeycutt. All told we have about 150 to 200 Gbps of circuits so it's fairly complicated.
Eurosport's facility within the IBC has seven production control rooms, including one each dedicated to Sweden and Norway, busy pulling in content from 28 OBS feeds, unilateral feeds from venues and beyond.
Eurosport also is embracing remote production as the production control room in the Hockey 1 venue also produces the games held in the Hockey 2 venue. That feed is then sent to the IBC via a 10 Gbps circuit.
There has been a lot of rapid decision making and load balancing across the team, but we have a great group of people who raised the production up really quickly, says Honeycutt. It's a complete and total host feed operation with unilateral wraparounds and it is all flypacks from NEP.
Some of the key tools keeping everything connected and moving include Lawo V_remote 4 for moving IP signals, EVS replay servers, ScheduALL as the brain of the operations, and Vizrt for the Cube AR studio.
Then there are production teams focused on specific nations, like Germany, Italy, England, Norway, and Sweden.
When you look at our model we are across various platforms: free-to-air, pay, and digital, says Schafer. And the free-to-air markets where we own those rights and have not sublicensed any of them are where we have invested significantly in the infrastructure. And Norway and Sweden were those two countries.
In those markets Eurosport was taking over for commercial broadcasters in both countries that were known for high levels of production. That meant the Eurosport teams had a lot to prove with viewers in those markets.
We really went all-in to give them all the resources they needed to deliver on that promise, he says. And that is why you will see control rooms from Norway and Sweden, significant sized studios, and the most people on site.
Common Ground
In recent months Eurosport has worked hard to find common needs and economies of scales that can be leveraged across the various production teams that are serving local needs.
If you look at the core teams from all the markets, there has not been one market that was not engaged or passionate about this since day one, says Schafer. And they all have other day jobs as well as with all of our other sports coverage and we were able to help them along that path. But coming into the games, when they were able to completely focus on it, they have delivered beyond my expectations and I think that just watching them come together, get on air, and the hosts and producers and everyone showing up in PyeongChang and rolling up their sleeves together has probably been the most rewarding thing for me at these Olympics.
Now that the games are under way and the teams are on site there has been an uptick in sharing of content, leveraging assets, and more. The result is an effort that finds what began as diverse teams working closer than ever.
Now that people are sharing [content and resources] we are working as one team because, naturally, you would think there would be some tension between teams, says Schafer. But I have not seen it and I strongly believe that comes back to starting this project together.
Schafer says that when he first tackled the project the first step was to make sure every stakeholder and market was part of the journey.
At the first World Broadcaster Meeting every market was there, and we also had workshops along the way, he says. And that bond has just grown since that first World Broadcaster Mee
