Making the Warner Bros. Discovery Sports Winter Olympics Production Work, From Monitoring to Transmission to Comms

Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Sports is managing a huge network of channels across Europe for the Winter Games, which means transmission and workflows are complex, monitoring is absolutely necessary for a consistent approach, and staying in touch on comms is crucial.

Despite major football tournaments in the UK meaning that the broadcaster was unable to broadcast the entire Games in UHD HDR, the production still went smoothly.

Monitoring markets

Speaking to SVG Europe from WBD House in Cortina, Scott Young, EVP at WBD Sports Europe, says he monitors the output of all WBD's main markets and provides feedback. He says of the monitoring room, this is where we keep an eye on the kids! .

He laughs and continues: As a former producer and someone who's very focused on our editorial ambition, it's directional help, it's a few tweaks, and it's, have you noticed? because there is a wall - if not a tsunami - of content coming at you from an Olympic Games.

How to tell those stories simultaneously [is complex], he continues. When you used to have a couple of channels, it was manageable. When you're broadcasting every moment of the Olympic Games [on multiple channels] where do you focus on and where do you send your reporters to? It's a very different beast now.

Young goes on: We've got a huge appetite. We want to serve up every moment of the Games. It's the advantage of streaming that now lets you watch what you want, where you want, when you want. We need to be in every one of those places to connect with the athletes. because just putting the OBS feeds to air isn't really the big challenge for us. It's being there when it matters, when the athletes have achieved something absolutely amazing and you want to get their story.

IBC relay station

WBD has a low reliance on the IBC operation, using it as a transmission point to get its content from the studios in Cortina at WBD House and Livigno at the Snow Dome, as well as the stories being made from crews across the Games in mixed zones and more, back to its co-location points and then out to the home markets.

Ian Cockett, GVP engineering and technology at Warner Bros. Discovery, in the engine room inside WBD House in CortinaYoung says on the smaller footprint at the Milano Cortina IBC: The goal from Tokyo was to reduce our footprint in the IBC. So as we did in Paris and as we've definitely done here in Milano Cortina, for us the IBC is a relay station.

It's where we connect to OBS [for the world feed], it's where we get our signals from and we also use our IBC station to connect to here [Cortina] and to Livigno and to all the other standup positions that we have, and then send it from Milan back to our in-country markets.

It's not a studio facility, it's not a home base for our markets, it's not somewhere where we create the editorial ambition, he adds. It is for the technical engineering teams to be based, and there's a few spare desks if you're in town, but really we want people to be out in the venues, we want people to be amongst the competition and we want people to be connecting with athletes. I think if we were in a studio inside the IBC, we would be falling short of our annual editorial ambition of Winter Games.

Transmission workflow

The technical details regarding the broadcast and networking infrastructure for the WBD production of the Olympic Winter Games is outlined by Ian Cockett, GVP engineering and technology at Warner Bros. Discovery, from the engine room inside WBD House in Cortina.

Sophie Lambert, manaing the audio and a lot more besides in the engine room of WBD House in Cortina during the Winter Olympics 2026Cockett explains the overall transmission workflow: All of the sources we have from this building are being carried over private fibre circuits back to the IBC in Milan. In Milan we have all of the OBS-provided feeds plus all of the feeds that we're sending from Cortina.

All of those then go back three ways into our European network infrastructure. They go back over some private fibre circuits to two data centres: one in the Netherlands, one in the UK. And we have three ways to go back there: we can go back via a primary and a secondary fibre path, and a tertiary path via Google Cloud to get to our data centres in case of complete disaster.

There's another bigger operation - slightly bigger than here - in Milan, he continues. But then we have the three ways out via our two colo sites and Google Cloud as backup.

For WBD's crews at the home bases across Europe, all the feeds are available from those two central data centres in the Netherlands and in London. Cockett adds: All of our European markets and everybody else who wants to look at what's going on in the Olympics can see everything. So if you're in Milan, or you're in Oslo, Copenhagen, or Portugal, wherever; if you are connected to one of our private data centres, you get to see all of the content, and you've also got access to monitoring with very low latency.

Audio matrix

Commentary is also part of the matrix, says Cockett: We do a lot of commentary workflows. We have something like 650 commentators working on the Olympics. Some of those are in our offices, some of them are working at home in their garden shed or the sauna at the end of their garden, he says. But all of those commentators are all connected to those two central data hubs. So as long as we get everything back from here into the centre of our hub you have access to all the content, all the feeds, in all of the languages.

On the intercom system being used, Cockett notes: We're using Riedel Artist; I think we have the largest Riedel Artist deployment. So all the countries and all of the markets in their home bases are all interconnected together. We have loads

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/02/24/making-the-warner-bros-discover...
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