OBS Director of Digital Content Production Matt Millington on Widgets, Athlete Moments, VR

OBS Director of Digital Content Production Matt Millington on Widgets, Athlete Moments, VR

OBS puts a lot of energy and time into digital fan engagement offerings, so what happens when the fans aren’t in the stands supporting their nation, and cheering on their friends and family? For OBS, it meant filling the gap with a new type of digital experience, one that not only can get virtual fans into the venues but also connect athletes with their friends and families immediately following a competition. Oh, and OBS had to do it quickly.

“It was a very late project that we basically started working on about four months ago when the announcement was made that international fans would not be allowed into the venues,” said Matt Millington, OBS, director of digital content production. “So, we started working on three products, two of them are geared towards the fans and one is geared towards the athletes.”

The two fan experiences were the Cheer Map and the Fan Video Wall.

“They are widgets that can be integrated on any rightholder’s page or any other partner like federations and national Olympic committees,” said Millington. “Cheer Map is a widget that allows fans to cheer for their country of choice and while it does default to where the IP is address is based, they can choose another country.”

Once in the widget, fans could virtually clap for their favorite nation’s athletes.

“We have a heat map of the world where you can see bubbles of support for different nations,” said Millington. “Interestingly, we’re getting a lot of traffic from India, a lot from Japan, obviously lot from Australia and we credit that to the time zone. But we have 205 countries or national Olympic committees and all of them have had cheers.”

As of July 30, more than 120 million fans had cheered and some also uploaded a selfie video from their phone or their laptop. Those videos were placed into a video matrix with 45 fans and those videos were then played out on the big screens at all the venues and made available to rightsholders.

“It allows fans to virtually be there and the sports presentation teams who control the video scoreboards can utilize both the map and the video,” added Millington.

The big addition, however, was the Athlete Moment, as it connected athletes with family and friends via video immediately after their competition.

“It’s been my favorite part of the project,” said Millington. “We’ve set up Athlete Moment viewing stations in selected venues, and we positioned it in a good place right before the mixed zone so it’s right in their path.”

Millington said there have been some fantastic moments, with the best usually involving a family gathered in a room having a watch party.

“It’s not the first time that this has been done but definitely the first time at this scale,” he said. “We have an operations center in Belgium, with a large team who are connecting with families prior to and during the event. And then we link them to the athlete.”

Key was making it simple for families at home to use. An athlete signed up to be part of the program and got a link that they then shared with family and friends.

“The family and friends click on that link and are connected to the team in Belgium who tells them what is going to happen and about things like delay,” he said.

It also appeared to be one of those things born of the pandemic that will stick around.

“We think it’s here to stay and we haven’t been able to cover every

Matt Millington and the OBS digital team worked hard to connect athletes with family and friends during the Games.

TOKYO OLYMPIC GAMES: OBS OBS Audio for the Tokyo Olympics Featured Immersive Sound, Augmented Crowd Noise

If you listened closely to the sound of the Tokyo Olympics, there were a lot of firsts. For instance, the broadcast by Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) was the first in 5.4.1 immersive audio, with four overhead channels adding an upper dimension to indoor events. And, because of last-minute government-imposed COVID restrictions barring spectators from most venues, it was the first-ever Olympics to deploy some form of artificial crowd noise.

“Immersive sound is our biggest challenge, because it’s new for 99% of the A1s and broadcast engineers,” said Nuno Duarte, senior manager, audio, OBS, from the International Broadcast Center (IBC) in Tokyo. The OBS production encompassed 42 competition venues, with customized production units and workflows. Overall, OBS deployed 31 outside-broadcast (OB) vans and 22 flypack systems designed specifically for and outfitted to meet these Games’ new and unique production and distribution requirements.

OBS captured the sounds of the Tokyo Olympics through an immersive 5.1.4 audio configuration that expanded on 5.1 surround sound: an overhead dimension in indoor venues is provided with the addition of four hanging ceiling microphones, whose height was adjustable based on the venue, and two new microphones — using 4.0 and 8.0 transducer configurations — were designed specifically for immersive-audio production.

In total, OBS deployed 3,600 microphones in 28 models. Three immersive-audio quality-control rooms supported the venue production and guarantee sonic consistency and quality across all sports. Only the coverage of the seven outside tennis courts remained in HD. There were also 46 stereo channels of radio feeds.

Broadcast-rightsholders took the immersive-audio signals from the OBS as a generic, linear, immersive 5.1.4 feed. Broadcasters deploying the Dolby Atmos codec in the U.S., UK, and Europe encoded their broadcasts locally. South Korea’s SDS broadcasted the Games in UHDTV using the MPEG-H format, which can support up to 64 loudspeaker channels and 128 codec core channels, confirmed by the Fraunhofer Institute, the codec’s owner.

NBCUniversal, as it did with its broadcasts of the Rio and Sochi Olympics, took live coverage from Tokyo and work with distribution partners, such as parent company Comcast/Xfinity, to deliver the Games to viewers in Dolby Atmos. NBCUniversal Director, Sound Design, Karl Malone confirmed that NBC used Dolby’s Atmos format, which took the raw 5.1.4 PCM feed from the OBS and encode to Atmos at its Englewood Cliffs, NJ, facility. The process, he said, works similarly to the Atmos workflow that NBC Sports developed over three seasons of Notre Dame Football broadcasts. “We will build on the OBS base layer and then add our own microphones to it.” he explained.

Duarte attributed the huge number and diversity of microphones to the wide range of events at this Olympiad. New sports — skateboarding, sport climbing, karate, and surfing among them — particularly created new challenges for Olympics audio. “For example, [for] climbing, we’re using a lot of microphones, as you can imagine,” he said. “You have three walls that you have to fill with microphones. We have a lot of new microphones — small shotguns, boundary microphones, new models, instead of the usual long shotguns — and it has been very successful. A big part of the OBS philosophy is to capture the details of the sports. Effects microphones are great for that.” Some of these sports benefited from deployment of two new immersive 4.0 and 8.0 microphones developed with the Olympics microphone partners. Divided into upper and lower layers of transducers, these custom mics allowed the Games’ audio technicians to capture conventional horizontal surround and the immersive Olympic Broadcast Services’ Nuno Duarte vertical overhead channels from a single microphone. “The lower layer is used for 5.1 surround,” Duarte explained. “What the upper layer generates is the third dimension, used for events like the marathon or outside events, where it’s more difficult to create these two layers with several microphones.” Duarte, who has worked in various capacities on Olympics broadcasts since Beijing in 2008, said this year’s approach to sound design was similar to what he has done in the past: building his sound design with a foundation of venue ambience, including crowds, and then layering effects and finally direct sound atop that — the details, he calls it — and keeping the focus (though not microphones; only some coaches and officials will be wired for sound) on the athletes and the microphones out of the cameras’ way. “Or at least to be discreet,” he added. “But I should say that more and more international federations are open to getting the sounds of the athletes or the coaches.” The Olympics aren’t necessarily known for low-frequency effects, but Duarte said effort was made to look for and capture as much highimpact sound as possible, such as by placing contact microphones on the water-polo goalposts to catch the sound of near misses. “There are a lot of challenges this time,” he said. “Immersive audio is new to most of us, and now the situation of no crowds will make the challenge bigger. We don’t see problems; we see challenges, and we also see opportunities. Everybody’s going to be out of their comfort zone. But it’s going to be good.” – Dan Daley This interview has been condensed and edited. To read the full interview, visit the SVG SportsTechLive Blog.

continued from page 52 venue and every sport but, in the future, that would be our real goal: to cover every sport. But there are some challenges like team sports with 11 or more members. How do you manage that with the time allowed? But we’ve learned a lot in the last two weeks about how to make the workflow better and what technology works best.”

Even the virtual fans could be a keeper.

“Clearly the audience within a venue is tiny compared to the worldwide audiences watching on television,” said Millington. “We’d like to see the technology progress to allow people to not only upload a video, but for us to be able to point to that video so they can get a link some minutes later to the video they are in.”

Since the PyeongChang Games in 2018, the OVP has undergone a redesign to not only make it cleaner but to also make the full app available as widgets and modules. Widgets included live sports results, the medals table, the schedule, athlete profiles, and video highlights or interviews. Live video was also available.

“We decided to split the OVP into widgets and we’ve seen huge uptake in those widgets or modules,” said Millington. “Rightsholders can take the live results, the medal count table or schedule as individual widgets. In fact, those three are the most popular as it is an easy way to integrate all the data. For a single rightsholder to try and take on the onus of stats is very impractical.”

On top of that, OBS also offered a simpler version in the I-frame that is slightly less customizable and was in use by more than 80 national Olympic committees and international federations.

VR also continued to be a part of the OBS deliverables, and the sports covered in VR for these games included beach volleyball, basketball, athletics, gymnastics, boxing, and the ceremonies.

“We went for sports where we could get pretty close to the action,” said Millington. “VR doesn’t really work very well on some of the larger venues like football where you’re a bit too far away from the actual field for a large amount of time. And then we have crews doing short pieces for all the other sports and that’s where we do a lot of the POVs with things like cameras on BMX, mountain bike, canoeing, or rowing.”

The biggest news on the VR front had less to do with the consumer experience and more with leveraging it to help solve a problem for broadcasters: getting a great venue image for a virtual studio backdrop. The images from the high VR cameras that provided an overall view of the venue solved that issue.

“Rightsholders can bring that back to their home base and make it look as if their announcers are in a VIP box,” said Millington. “It’s actually very good and really effective and that will be seeing more progress in the Beijing Games [next February] where it will be in all venues. It’s not a difficult thing to do as it’s just a single fixed camera feed straight from the venue.”

VR will also make the move to 8K acquisition in Beijing, something Millington said will make the viewing experience much better.

“When you see 8K in VR, it’s distinctly different and you don’t need to be a visual expert to see a massive improvement,” said Millington. “So, we’ll be doing that in Beijing.” – Ken Kerschbaumer

Athletes celebrated their achievements with friends and family via the OBS Athlete Moment setup. © 2021 OBS / Owen Hammon