Beijing 2022: OBS CTO Sotiris Salamouris Discusses How 5G, Virtualized Tech, and the Cloud Are Transforming the Games By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Friday, February 4, 2022 - 12:52 pm
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At the Tokyo Games OBS Chief Technology Officer Sotiris Salamouris and the team at Olympic Broadcasting Services embraced a number of new technologies, like IP, UHD, and HDR, at a scale never before seen. At the Beijing Winter Olympics those efforts continue but with even more innovation thanks to the use of 5G, virtualized hardware systems, and more. Salamouris laid out some of the vision in the OBS Media Guide late last week.
Sotiris Salamouris, OBS, CEO
What is your role with OBS during the Planning phase and Games-time?
My title is Chief Technology Officer of OBS and the Olympic Channel. At an Olympic Games, OBS has a double mission. One is as a production company, which means having all the people needed to cover and produce coverage of the Olympics. The other is as a technical company to support the requirements of the Rights Holding Broadcasters (RHBs) and provide a large number of technical facilities and services to them. Because we relocate to the host city for a much longer period than they do, it means we are able to build and put in place technical systems that RHBs are either unable to do by themselves or too costly.
Therefore, the responsibilities of the OBS technical teams are twofold: on one hand, providing support for OBS to successfully deliver the coverage of the Games; on another hand, providing RHBs with all the required facilities and infrastructure for their production objectives. We build a lot of technical systems for the RHBs, from their technical facilities inside the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) and/or the Zhangjiakou Mountain Broadcast Centre (ZBC) to TV studios, to specific technical areas in all venues. We even provide specialized cabling and technical storage services. Additionally, we deliver essentially all their broadcast telecommunications and connectivity needs to connect between the venue and the IBC and from the IBC to practically everywhere in the world. Our Directory of Services is a very thick catalogue of virtually hundreds of technical facilities and services that every RHB can select from, all made available by OBS to facilitate their production workflows for the Games. Increasingly, many of these services are also built and made available in the cloud.
What effect has the short turnaround from Tokyo 2020 and the pandemic had on your preparations?
The people who work for OBS have several Games behind them, so they know what is involved in a cycle where we start preparing at least four years before. Soon after the host city is announced, we start preparing the large projects, most notably the telecommunication network that links the venues to the IBC and the IBC itself. Of course, as we are constantly getting closer to the Games, the preparations become more intense.
The situation in Beijing is different. We followed the standard pattern, but the postponement of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics was a big disruption. Normally, we would have a year and half from the end of the Olympic Games to the Olympic Winter Games when the final preparations take place. This time, it was just a few months, which made our activation plans much more complex and denser. We were still working on Tokyo 2020 when under normal circumstances we would have exclusively been focusing on Beijing 2022.
The pandemic has been a big challenge since we were also not able to visit Beijing, except in a few exceptional cases, which meant we were working almost blind in situations when we would normally be on-site and visiting the venues. Because of the deep experience of our teams, but also using effectively all the remote planning tools available, we are at the point where one way or the other, we have managed to overcome the vast majority of the difficulties we faced. We are extremely confident about our level of readiness going into these Games.
OBS made a successful transition to UHD HDR and immersive audio to offer a new level of picture and audio quality in Tokyo. How satisfying is that to see and how will this be carried out and consolidated in Beijing?
Tokyo 2020 were definitely ground-breaking Games in terms of broadcast technology as we offered a large number of firsts. The major change that we introduced at Tokyo 2020 was the full introduction of live coverage in UHD HDR, which was a breakthrough in format delivery for the Games' live signal.
Introducing UHD and HDR was much more challenging from when we introduced HD for the Beijing 2008 Olympics. UHD isn't a small increase in data flow, it is eight times more than HD 1080i, which has been the standard of video delivery before Tokyo. This means a big change in all of the back-end systems and the technical infrastructure that can support such mega large bitrates. In addition, there is the HDR factor, which by itself is extremely complex, because HDR is a totally different way of presenting colors and levels of luminance and that requires a completely different kind of live production workflow.
On parallel, you also need to keep the system consistent with the SDR HD signal that is still our main content distribution format and the one that most of the broadcasters still use, so the introduction of UHD HDR in Tokyo had to also take this constraint into account.
In the end, we have developed one single live production workflow that was able to simultaneously deliver both UHD HDR and HD SDR, with exactly the same visual content and the only difference being the significantly enhancement in picture quality that comes from UHD together with HDR.
Surprisingly, our unified new UHD HD workflow had one unexpected but extremely welcomed side-effect: It also contributed to improve the HD picture
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Beijing 2022: OBS CTO Sotiris Salamouris Discusses How 5G, Virtualized Tech, and the Cloud Are Transforming the Games By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
