entertainment. [First] the lean back experience, where our linear channels will bring you the very best of the Olympics – broadcasting in 47 markets in 19 languages. “So depending on what market you’re in, we’ll curate the best of the Olympics on that linear channel to you. Or, you can lean forward through our streaming products and select the sport you want to watch from start to finish, as every sport is available live across our different products.” “There are a lot of storytelling challenges,” adds McDonald. “How do we make sure every territory can see every feed, every camera? How do we make sure – from an audio point of view – we can deliver these 19 different languages and hundreds of commentary booths required across Europe to make that happen? And then, how do we provide a flexible infrastructure within that to share all our resources across EMEA? “AI is something we’re looking heavily into at the moment. The question is, how do we use AI to help our staff be more productive and faster, enabling them to tell those stories? “For this Olympics, we’ve got a set of new innovations. We have a cloud-based platform that enables us to be very sophisticated in terms of management of playlists and opting in and out of pans. We’ve a whole set of cloud-based technology we’re using to support production. On top of that, our whole cloud infrastructure is a massive SMPTE 2110 implementation that provides the scale and flexibility we need to make the Olympics happen.” ENSURING FAN ENGAGEMENT Naturally, the Olympics also serve as a colossal money-making opportunity for advertising and extra fan engagement features.
“With the Olympics, you need to reach millions of people with the best quality possible,” begins Jean Macher, senior director for global SaaS solutions at Harmonic. “You need to ensure the platform you use is resilient and can provide a video pipeline. That’s what VOS360 is able to do.” Harmonic’s VOS360 takes even the most complex workflow and abstracts it to a simple layer with guaranteed reliability. Receive content at the source, uplink to the cloud, insert and personalise the content, then distribute to your viewer’s screen. “When you have the Olympics – because it’s such a massive event with so many different live sports streams – you don’t want anything to go wrong. Because when it’s live, you have the blast radius, where if you have a problem anywhere in a chain, that can impact millions of people.” Macher further emphasises that ensuring a high- quality viewer experience should be the top priority for networks and platforms that plan to broadcast the games. “The platform you use must be resilient. For that, you need to build enough redundancy in your architecture so you can tackle problems as they come up. That means for viewers across separate regions in massive events like these – if you have enough redundancy and you lose an entire region – you’re still in business because another region is able to pick up that slack. “VOS360 brings some unique features where we are able to synchronise different regions. It also has a cluster architecture in addition to being cloud native and all-elastic. Therefore if you lose a node, another pops up. “Ultimately, the more the user experience is refined, the more likely it will lead to increased engagement. This will generate more monetisation opportunities. We offer targeted ad insertion in order to ensure the user is engaged even during a break.”
GRANDEUR Opening its doors for Paris 2024, the Palace of Versailles will offer spectators an exceptional spectacle
INSIDE THE ACTION View of the production control room at NBC Sports headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut
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