innovations will leave a legacy to build on at future editions of the Olympic Games.” The IOC began dedicating more effort to streaming and digital content a decade ago, but many of these initiatives have come into their own at Tokyo 2020. OBS is also aware of the need for broadcasters to remotely produce in order to save costs – and cut down on its carbon footprint – for some time. For all these reasons, when the Games were postponed, OBS said there was no need to make any reductions to its original production plan. If anything, its output has been used to a greater extent than ever before. With broadcasters deciding to take fewer personnel than planned to Japan, and with the IOC placing further restrictions on the number of foreign crew (for example, only one rights-holder camera operator allowed in the mixed zone, rather than a camera op, plus sound op and producer), coverage from Tokyo relied heavily on material captured by OBS. The OBS feed, sent out to rights-holding broadcasters around the world, features all the competitive action. But it is behind-the-scenes interviews, Olympic Village, team clips and local city colour that remote rights holders have been restricted from capturing – but which OBS has been pouring into a media archive it calls Content+. Most of the 9000 clips in Content+ are intended for web and social platforms – 30% more than Rio 2016 – and deliberately filmed on smartphones to feed mobile consumption.
LOOKING FORWARD OBS CEO Yiannis Exarchos believes the future is ever-changing
Discovery, which paid €1.3bn for the pan-European rights for the Games between 2018 and 2024, has gone further. It managed to place remote-operated cameras in select athlete villages to facilitate safely distanced interviews. NBC has a pact with Twitter to produce ‘gamified activations’ and bespoke interviews, as well
as Primetime Sidecasting, during which Twitch creators commentate on NBC’s live broadcast on a second screen app. CLOUD AND ATMOSPHERES OBS also had in place various cloud- based solutions, allowing broadcasters access to all the content it produced.
IT IS STILL RELATIVELY EARLY DAYS IN THE FULL CHANGE TO CLOUD TECHNOLOGY, AND TOKYO 2020 MARKS A FIRST STEP
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