17 SPORTS FOCUS The Olympic Games
GOING FOR GOLD The OBS is providing coverage for every live event, not only in UHD 4K, but also in HDR
The broadcast of the Olympics is itself an Olympian feat – and one that gets more complex and impressive with each passing Games
t the time of writing, major sporting events are being cancelled in response to the Covid-19 crisis. With the
Olympics still four months away and the situation constantly changing, it’s still not clear what fate awaits the world’s biggest celebration of sports. But whatever time, place and form the competition takes, Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) has been developing and preparing one of the most formidable operations in sports TV. OBS is the official host broadcaster of all Olympic Games and is responsible for covering and distributing all the action. It delivers signals to all rights-holding broadcasters – like NBC in the US and the BBC in the UK – throughout the world. “It would be financially and logistically impossible for these rights-holders to independently do their own coverage of all the games,” says Sotiris Salamouris, OBS chief technology officer. “So they rely on us to fully cover every sport in the most skilled manner and then deliver the signals. When
you watch the Games, maybe 80% of what you see is what we produce here at OBS.” OBS also provides the facilities that enable rights-holding broadcasters to do their own coverage on-site. The International Broadcast Centre is a massive building, containing broadcast, operations and editing facilities, which allows broadcasters from around the world to parachute into a foreign location, leaving months – or years – of necessary preparation to be sorted out by OBS. Generally, as one Summer Olympic Games
concludes, OBS is beginning its planning for the next one in four years’ time. “Establishing a presence at the Olympics is very difficult to do without some kind of support,” explains Salamouris. Right now over 100 employees, mostly from Japan, are working to put the finishing physical and digital touches on the International Broadcast Centre. The plan – again, at the time of writing – is for the Japanese broadcast teams and the big crew from NBC to start moving into the International Broadcast Centre in May,
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