8 YOUR TAKE Tokyo 2021
that the Olympic broadcasters will be more and more keen on following us on that same path. ON THE SAME TEAM While I fully expected our teams to adapt and acclimate to a new remote working scenario, I am continuously impressed and motivated by the dedication the teams of both OBS and the Olympic Channel have shown in continuing to deliver all that is required to keep our plans on track. On the one hand: the OBS team, which had already started getting into an operational mode for Tokyo 2020, shifted within hours to a massive replanning phase encompassing the Tokyo Games, now planned for 2021, the Beijing Games in winter 2022 and the Dakar Youth Olympic Games in the fall of 2022 – an unprecedented sequence of massively complex events. Meanwhile, the Olympic Channel team continued, without missing a beat, to produce and operate not just the Olympic Channel platform and its different versions around the world, but also the Tokyo 2020 website as the content and technology powerhouse of the wider Olympic digital strategy. All this was done without a single member of the two teams needing to have a presence on our premises. So many of them have gone above and beyond what is expected, despite also having to factor in the additional demands of working alongside their partners, supporting their children and their education, or being in total isolation. What we have learned, or perhaps what we have always known, THE OBS TEAM, WHICH HAD ALREADY STARTED GETTING INTO AN OPERATIONAL MODE FOR TOKYO 2020, SHIFTEDWITHIN HOURS TO AMASSIVE REPLANNING PHASE
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© Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS)
is that we have assembled a team of highly professional individuals whose commitment to the success of the Olympic Games, and the Olympic values themselves, is undeniable. The lack of technology or digital tools has not been a major hurdle in the fast adoption of digital workflows in the media industry per se. On the contrary, we have long now realised within OBS and the Olympic Channel that the existing technology is already quite advanced and reliable for us. Possibly the biggest hurdle has been a level of inertia from certain players in the industry in adopting something that is different from what they have been used to, and this inertia is quite an important factor. We realise again and again that it
can limit the speed of implementation of technologies, regardless of the maturity of these available technologies. This represents an opportunity that pandemic. It has made the advantages of digitalisation even more obvious and it has provided a ‘super-accelerated’ training for millions of media professionals on digital workflows and tools that otherwise would have taken years to be completed. After the pandemic, we will enter a very different era in the methodologies and workflows that will be followed in content production, management and distribution. OBS and the Olympic Channel are more than ready to accept the challenge. comes out of the very unfortunate circumstances of the coronavirus
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