23 minute read
The First Olympics Only for Broadcast
The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games have been the most complicated in history. An event as important as the Olympics, and not only at a sporting level, but also in terms of innovation in the creation and efficiency of technical and human infrastructures, proved to be a real headache for the organizers. Of course, in the global framework in which they have been developed, the pandemic has been very present. And this major handicap has made this latest edition of the Olympic Games the first in history to be solely and exclusively told and shown to the world through technology. This is both a problem and an opportunity to give technology for the broadcasting of content the important role it deserves.
Sotiris Salamouris is the Chief Technology Officer of Olympics Broadcasting Services (OBS). His role is to oversee all technical operations of the Olympic broadcasters. Among his responsibilities is to lead the teams responsible for the design and control of the technical infrastructure and operations of OBS. He must also set the long-term technology roadmap for the Olympics. For the last five editions of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Sotiris has been responsible for setting the technical and human resources guidelines for the broadcasting of the sports content generated by these major events.
The CTO has offered us a compilation of the technological improvements they have implemented in these Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.But he also shared with this magazine his concerns about the future of broadcast technology and the challenges that have arisen in the OBS race to reach the goal of innovation. And, of course, the problems and solutions they have created from scratch to circumvent the problems arising from the COVID19 pandemic.
Photos Credit: © 2021 Olympic Broadcasting Services
Regarding the Tokyo 2020 edition of the Olympic Games, what are the most important technological innovations?
We live in a technological age and, of course, each edition of the Olympic Games is accompanied by many technological innovations. But I have to say that several of these changes have been exacerbated by the pandemic. However, as far as the Tokyo Olympics and specifically our operations as a sports broadcaster are concerned, the biggest technological improvement we have made has been the introduction of Ultra High Definition. The last time there was such a technological change was in 2008 with the Beijing Olympics, where all coverage went from Standard Definition to High Definition.
This innovation also includes implementations of High Dynamic Range and Wide Color Gamut. That's something very
Sotiris Salamouris is the Chief Technology Officer of Olympics Broadcasting Services (OBS). His role is to oversee all technical operations of the Olympic broadcasters.
important because we are talking about all live content being produced that way. For the Tokyo Games, all our coverage is simultaneous in UHD and also in HD. We have more than 80 multilateral feeds coming from all the venues. Each sport is covered by one or more production lines, and that's the technological breakthrough: all the transmissions are going to be based on UHD standards along with HDR and WCG.
This update also includes an important audio innovation. We are also complementing this content with 5.1.4 immersive sound. We deliver 10 discrete channels in a 5.1.4 configuration. Subsequently, broadcasters can compress or repack into one of the immersion standards they want to follow.
The second innovation, which is also linked to this resolution upgrade, is the conversion of a major part of our broadcast infrastructure to IP. All our UHD contribution and distribution is taking place over a live IP infrastructure.
The latter is, of course, the adoption of a predominantly public cloud to support a large part of our production workflows. The difference that makes this interesting, rather than using the public cloud only for our postproduction workflows, is that our cloud solutions also involve part of our live distribution workflow. Every UHD live stream is distributed to multiple broadcasters around the world through a public cloud. This is a very important innovation, as a few years ago dealing with live HD signals within the cloud was considered a challenge.
How has this UHD / HDR / WCG upgrade affected production teams? Does everyone have to learn new skills?
The UHD element, in the sense of its advanced resolution, is not necessarily changing too much of how sports are covered. This is taken into account when thinking about how the story is going to be told. Of course, having more pixels and better picture quality helps them be a little more creative in how they cover the picture.
However, there are some elements of the camera that are becoming a bit more sensitive. HDR and WCG can capture a much richer and broader set of colors and light levels and, cameramen should be aware of this.
Our coverage is unified. This means we use the same cameras that ultimately deliver UHD and HD content. The vast majority of the cameras are native UHD and most of them record in native HDR, HLG, which is our HDR format. We have more than 1,300 cameras from different brands.
What are your signals flows like?
Most of the cameras we use are UHD ready, but not all. Some of the cameras may not be HDR ready or may not be UHD ready. In these cases, we do the conversion.
However, the content must be delivered in HD or UHD resolution. We have to be very careful in the conversion of this material. To prove this, we have done a lot of internal development.
We have explored how the output is visually controlled. We have introduced the new layers of visual engineering and
control, plus layers of quality checking and adjustment to be sure that we are going to have excellent output in both UHD/HDR and, very importantly, HD/HDR. And this is significant because 90% of broadcasters are still distributing globally in this standard. However, we are very confident that they are performing excellently. That has been a challenge.
What will be the future of OBS, how are you going to push the boundaries of these standards you mentioned earlier? OBS is always focused on improving and upgrading the infrastructure, how is it going to become more important?
We are a sports production company with a mission to provide the best possible coverage for all the different sports that are part of the Olympic ecosystem. But
we are also the only host for many broadcasters who don't have the muscle to spend time and money planning for the upcoming games. That means they rely on us to provide a lot of technical services. In terms of innovation, we strive to innovate, both as a production company and as storytellers for the games.
There is innovation that is purely technical, such as special cameras. There are all kinds of cameras developed for specific sports. These cameras are continually being developed because the way they are built ensures that they will capture that particular moment that is important for the sport they are going to cover. This part of the innovation will continue in the future. Improved technical services for broadcasters, such as UHD, and methods of sharing content, such as the cloud, will also continue.
However, we have to be reasonably conservative. We are going to use this technology because we want to be innovative, but on the other hand, we have a big responsibility as we do this to provide those very resilient and very solid services, technically speaking. We are always balancing these two areas because we can't afford to compromise really important content to the global audience.
Due to the pandemic situation, in just a few months we will have the Beijing Winter Games. In this next edition, we will not make a major change from what we have done in Tokyo. We will adjust our technology and learn
from this experience to adapt it so that it will be even safer when used in Beijing. Paris is three years later. We have a lot of ideas about Paris, but we are only beginning to consider what we should do next.
Is the IP infrastructure upgrade related to 5G coverage?
The use of 5G for broadcast developers is also related and made possible by the adoption of IP in our infrastructure. The first thing we did is that we replaced our postproduction workflows gradually. We have already made the transition. What remains to be done is to migrate all the broadcast technology used in live coverage to IP. 5G now comes very well because it is a much more powerful mobile technology than the traditional one we have been using in previous generations. It also comes with two additional requirements that are very good for broadcast: more
bandwidth and very low latency. This allows us to use 5G in additional workflows, especially now that we are already moving to IP, live workflows that were not possible before with 4G.
At this stage, we have conducted a proof of concept ourselves with our partner Intel. For the Tokyo games, we have developed 5G coverage that has been used in the ceremonies predominantly and also in some other sports. We have used some specialized 5G wireless cameras and expect to use more of them in the future.
Will we see only wireless production equipment in the future?
I'm not sure it's going to happen. Wireless is a good solution because it gives freedom. But I don't think the day will come when we will stop using wires, because wires also have their own important advantages. Whatever you do, with 5G or anything like it, you're always going
to have less bandwidth available than if you use wired technology.
Why did you decide to make the OBS cloud public? Why not private?
The main advantage of using this infrastructure is that it exists everywhere. Almost everyone can access it and it has a lot of capacity. We work with Alibaba and they also offer a wide variety of services. Alibaba has helped us a lot because it allows us to have direct access to their infrastructure and professional resources and services.
On the other hand, if I do something in a private cloud, this is a solution just for me. That will just be restricted infrastructure, either within the transmission center here in Tokyo or in another center somewhere in the world.
In this particular case, we wanted to take advantage of the ubiquity of a public cloud, because one of the things we need to do as a host broadcaster is to create content and distribute it globally. And I can't replicate Alibaba's infrastructure, which provides cloud services to thirty regions around the world.
How has Artificial Intelligence been indispensable in these Olympic Games, and how will it be indispensable in the future?
AI is not new, but it has become quite a bit more interesting in recent years because it can greatly help broadcasting in various workflows. We have created over 9,000 hours of Olympic content, which is a combination of our live content along with additional postproduced content. The
biggest problem we have, once it has been produced, is knowing what has been produced.
If this information is not available, nothing can be done with all this content. Because of this need, we ourselves have traditionally carried out an important operation of recording these contents during their creation. This operation required, and still requires, a lot of human effort. The technology comes with the hope that some of that will now be done by artificial intelligence. It can recognize what's going on in the video or audio and point and say, okay, that was a foul, for instance.
On the one hand, that will free up some of our need to use people to do it, but, even more importantly, it can improve our labeling. We can't label everything, because we all have limited attention spans. However, if machines do it, the task is completed much faster and with much higher quality than if we had done it ourselves.
There is another type of AI application that is starting to become a reality. And we may come to not require the typical set-up with a director and a video operator to switch cameras in a production control. Of course, we are far from doing it with the quality with which humans do it. But it could be done automatically thanks to this technology.
For example, in firstround tennis matches, this AI-based self-realization technology could be used. This is because we have been covering these matches on a delayed basis. We don't cover them live because we would need an additional amount of resources and that could be a problem. Potentially, we will be able to do that someday with AI-based automatic live switching. We have already tested it for the Youth Olympic Games.
Has COVID-19 changed your workflows?
In relation to the pandemic, we have had to be more efficient in bringing people in. There are more than 8,000 people working for the Olympics and the vast majority of them have been in Tokyo. Normally, we would need even more. We used technology to further improve the way we do our workflow. In this way, we have used even fewer staff than we would need to do it locally. And this talent that has emerged is because of COVID-19.
We also had to redesign several of our facilities. We had to change the layout of some of our studios, including the layout of some of our control areas to eliminate some of our equipment that was inside OB vans because we didn't want to have so many people inside those vehicles. We had to make a number of changes, partly operational and partly technical, to meet the constraints.
In addition, of course, this edition of the Olympic Games has had a major challenge: we have not received any public. This has meant that we have had to do several things to cover this major handicap.
We have made adaptations in our audio plans knowing that we are not going to have a crowded environment. In addition, we have had to provide technical solutions to somehow bring the audience inside the venue. For example, we have helped the other broadcasters so that they can conduct remote interviews with the relevant athletes without sharing the same space.
We have also launched a project called the "Fan Engagement Project," which allows audiences around the world to cheer remotely at matches, and for these cheers to appear at major events. Or even facilitate the interaction of athletes with their families who have not been allowed to come to Japan.
It is a pity but, precisely because of this situation, it has fallen on our shoulders to bring this content to all the local and international audience. Everyone has seen the games through television or the other digital media that have distributed this edition of the Olympic Games. There has been no other way to enjoy them.
Conclusion
Against all odds, an edition of the Olympic Games over which there were doubts about its success even a few hours before its official opening, has become a complete triumph. And also, and very important, it has meant an injection of confidence and capacity to overcome the challenges that the pandemic has posed to all of us. And, as we have been able to see, the technology for the broadcast has far exceeded expectations by bringing the best human qualities of elite sport to every home.
LITTLE BIG OLYMPIC GAMES
Doing more with less
The goal of the whole team concerned with the broadcast of the Olympic Games is to offer more content, in a better way, with more quality and concerning many more participants. And, on top of this, do it with the least amount of resources. The technology involved in the production and broadcast of these contents has contributed enormously to reducing the impact on the environment that an event like this usually causes.
An incentive has been the pandemic that was caused by Covid-19, which we all had to go through. Times are changing and the paradigm has shown how important it is to adapt to remote production and the technological capacity we have to do so. The pandemic has caused destruction, true. But it has also got us to think outside the box and given us an opportunity to rethink and reshape our future. And, in this path, OBS is a pioneer.
OBS has long been trying to create the least impact for the planet and endeavored to use the least amount of resources possible in each host city in which the Olympics have been organized. The plans to create the infrastructure and the means used for broadcasting are increasingly becoming less expensive in terms of the environmental burden that they entail and provide better broadcast quality.
The path that this organization has always followed requires optimization of the space and the energy used -for which the large International has been restructured Broadcasting Center (IBC) in Tokyo- and, not least important, to implement the benefits of the digital transformation, among which we have, for example, the implementation of a new resolution standard: UHD/HDR.
Therefore, we have prepared a comprehensive guide to all the innovations -both technological and structural- implemented by OBS in this edition of the Olympic Games, taking into account their improvements for the preservation of the planet.
UHD / HDR / 5.1.4
The innovations in the technological field that OBS has offered in this edition of Tokyo 2020 are many and very interesting. It is remarkable the fact that we are about to experience another transition like the one we went through a while ago with the change in resolution: from SD to HD. OBS has proposed one more development, the next natural step for broadcasting: from HD to UHD. And of course it has not been necessary to dedicate an unprecedented infrastructure on this process, but rather the opposite.
Under the guise of offering more for fewer resources, OBS has become an ally with the technologies involved in communication, delivery, and storage, such as 5G networks or cloud systems. Each UHD signal generates eight times more information than an HD signal. But, as if this amount of data were not enough, OBS has broadcast the first Olympic Games in high dynamic range (HDR) and immersive audio 5.1.4.
OBS has broadcast UHD signals combined with HDR and WCG (Wide Color Gamut) from 42 sports competitions, only excluding the eight outdoor tennis courts, which have remained broadcast through conventional signal in HD. To meet these needs, OBS has used a total of 31 mobile units (OB vans) and 22 fly-away systems.
Regarding capture of immersive sound, OBS has succeeded in getting viewers from home to be able to perceive the atmosphere of each sports event in a threedimensional environment. To achieve this, OBS has expanded 5.1 sound by adding a third dimension through the creation of a technical ceiling featuring four hanging microphones that could be modified in height and direction for each occasion.
HD vs. UHD
Nearly all content that OBS has generated has been produced natively in UHD/HDR. But, what happens with that signal if in ultra definition it cannot find its own infrastructure for broadcasting? As we have mentioned, we are facing a paradigm shift,
but we are still in an embryonic phase. And the infrastructure required for everyone willing to broadcast a signal like this to succeed has not yet been created. Likewise, OBS is also in the process of adapting and part of the cameras that it has used to produce the Games are only capable of obtaining a signal in HD. For this reason, OBS has had to adapt to all standards.
All signals have gone through a process of rescaling and duplication for broadcasting. The solution found by the Olympic Broadcasting Services has been to create an adapted model so that each Mobile Unit (OB van) is capable of generating an HD 1080i SDR signal from the source UHD/HDR signals and from the other HD signals. In this way, the entire demand from the other broadcasters that have been involved in the process has been met. This model is based on the creation of an entire Internet Protocol infrastructure.
Cloud solutions
The pandemic and new remote production processes are also changing the creation of content and its subsequent dissemination. Compared to Rio 2016, the connectivity of Tokyo 2020 has been ten times higher. This data provides the certainty that broadcasters are becoming more and more digital. OBS has not been left behind and, in order to facilitate remote operations for broadcasters who broadcast Olympic content, it has created -in cooperation with Alibabaa cloud specially designed for the heavy files generated by the production of the Games.
For associate broadcasters this is a turning point. Thanks to the implementation of cloud services, they have managed to reduce travel costs, costs associated with the creation of an operations center in Tokyo and, even more importantly, the carbon burden associated with former production ways.
5G Transmission
5G will offer wireless contribution with enough bandwidth as to carry the signal in UHD. The data handled in this edition of the Olympic Games has been around 100 Mb per second, with download speed peaks of up to 20 Gb per second and latencies not exceeding one millisecond. These capabilities have allowed the signal to be transmitted with quality and efficiency thanks to such a low latency.
The initial 5G tests carried out by OBS were performed in Pyongyang 2018 and the plans of the Broadcast Service providers in the Olympic Games foresee the adoption of this technology again during the 2022 Winter Olympic Games to be held Beijing, where it is estimated that there will be an operational 5G network already in place.
Artificial Intelligence solutions
At some point in the
future, the effects of production on climate change will be reduced to practically zero through processes automated by means of Artificial Intelligence. For now, OBS has implemented in this edition of the Olympics solutions based on Artificial Intelligence for tracking and tagging tasks. These processes, especially tagging, have always required OBS to devote a huge human team to ensure that the images they produced on each edition of the Olympics were correctly cataloged.
This software solution has been named AMD (Automatic Media Description) and its mission is to automatically catalog the images by recognizing the elements that comprise them. In addition, OBS will introduce other systems such as BDF (Broadcast Data Feed) that will recognize athletes contained in the aforementioned images through an extensive library where their physical and personal features are stored. Another piece of software that will also take part in these automation systems is the simultaneous transcription that will be carried out once the signal is produced.
But OBS, is not content living it at that. In Beijing 2022, the broadcasting services will expand these processes to as many sports as possible. In this way, they will implement their solutions based on Artificial Intelligence to international workflows and, on the other hand, they will make this technology available to any broadcaster interested in acquiring broadcasting permits for the Olympic Games. Likewise, in its future plans, OBS will try to implement Artificial Intelligence in user customization processes by generating appropriate content for each viewer, creating automatic summaries through the detection of patterns and generating forecasts for the athletes' performances through historical data, personal conditions or, simply, situational factors.
International Broadcast Center
OBS's technical facilities are located in the IBC, which, on this occasion, has been deployed on already existing fair grounds built in Tokyo Bay. Its actual name is Tokyo Big Sight, being one of the largest convention centers in the entire country. All the signals captured by the OBS cameras have been relayed to this central hub and its workers have been operating 24/7 to make these signals go through the aforementioned processes and end up in the hands of at least 80 broadcasters that have broadcast the Olympic Games. Time is of the essence, since all these processes must be executed in real time. For all these reasons, the Tokyo IBC has been, for 17 days, the largest content broadcast center in the world.
However, this large infrastructure deployment has not significantly affected much the climate load associated with these means of production. A new model is sought for each edition of the Olympic Games. Each site is unique and has different advantages and drawbacks. On this occasion, the Olympic Committee had a huge advantage: the city of Tokyo was able to provide the infrastructure. Existing facilities have been fitted to house two large entities: OBS and OCOG, whose initials correspond to the Organizing Committee. In this way, the environmental impact associated to construction of new facilities or to housing these institutions in separate places is decreased.
Much more for much less
The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games have brought the world more than 10,000 hours of content produced and distributed by OBS. This represents 30% more than the content that was produced in the last edition of the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. More than 1,800 cameras and 3,600 microphones have generated around 290 graphic signals in HD and UHD resolutions and around 46 sound signals in stereo. 9,000 people have been part of all the processes in which OBS has been involved. The ongoing digital transformation of broadcast media has prompted OBS to multiply the number of terabytes by 7, for a total of 2.7 Tb, corresponding to the international bandwidth it has used to send its signals through IP. In Tokyo 2020, OBS has used around 40,000 square meters of infrastructure at the IBC.
However, the carbon footprint generated by these Olympic Games has been 21% lower than in the previous edition, when it comes to the IBC facilities. Regarding the footprint on the environment created by the combination of production teams in each of the places where sports competitions have been held, it has been 24% lower than the environmental burden generated in Rio de Janeiro 2016.
The digital transformation that OBS has carried out for this edition of the Games has been crucial in reducing the greenhouse gases generated by all the technical and human infrastructure necessary to produce a sports event of such magnitude. Process virtualization through remote access, improved connectivity, cloud solutions and updated technical equipment have brought the Olympic Broadcast Services closer to the goal of reducing the environmental footprint. A goal that will soon be achievable in the Olympic future and one that will mean offering much more for much less.
