emphasised one of the biggest challenges faced by the production team: “Coordination. Having to coordinate so many channels. We have all these venues with all these signals, but the challenge is to make three live programmes all at the same time.” The tour concluded with a step inside the on-site OB truck, also hard at work behind the scenes of the colossal broadcast. SEINE-SATIONAL NUMBERS We’ve heard about the production, but how did the coverage do? According to data listed by France TV post-games, the average French viewer watched more than 24 hours of Olympics coverage on the France TV network. On top of this, France 2 was the number-one French channel watched during the entire two weeks. The somewhat damp (both in terms of location and weather conditions) opening ceremony raked in a tidy 23.4 million French viewers, with the closing ceremony jubilantly drawing proceedings to a close with 17.1 million – peaking at 20.6 million. The channels saw a cumulative audience share of 50.2% and France 2 was the number-one French channel over the whole two weeks. It also saw a peak of 15 million viewers during Léon Marchand’s fourth gold medal win of the games and 13.9 million viewers during his second. There was a peak of 13.2 million viewers for the French team’s victory in the judo event and 11.8 million viewers for France’s gold medal in Rugby Sevens. Surfing events were watched by 19.3 million people in mainland France and in overseas departments. On top of this, there were 39 million views for the online channel France TV Paris 2024 throughout the Olympics, with more than 11 million unique visitors. The live chat, Fanzone, welcomed more than one million participants over the course of the games. At time of writing, the Paralympics are soon to get underway. France TV’s coverage of the Paralympics, held 28 August to 8 September, will offer 24/7 viewing. With a coverage relay between France 2 and France 3, and full coverage online, viewers will be able to view all of the action without missing a moment.
has been widespread, making France TV’s steps towards this goal somewhat inevitable. “Currently, we have four studio galleries, six or seven studio sets and it’s a nightmare every year when we change the shows that we are doing on different sets, to cross everything. France TV is a huge TV channel, so we have a lot of feeds. “ST 2110 will help deal with that, bringing us a lot of flexibility in terms of formats, higher resolution – UHD.” Following this intro, we were led into the traffic room. The wall featured a mosaic of live feeds; hundreds coming from the host of live events, all taking place in different locations, all at once. The traffic room is the first port of call of said feeds, Rat explains, which are then pushed through to the network’s control rooms. These control rooms were the next tour stop. The atmosphere in these rooms was an intriguing marriage of tension and excitement, with the operators hard at work putting live Olympics content together for the two 24-hour channels. This was followed by a chat with Fred Gaillard, head of production for the Olympics at France TV. He
FEED ME All feeds enter through the traffic room, from which they are pushed through into smaller control rooms
GO OUTSIDE France TV has ten OB units that it uses for all its live sports coverage, each one equipped with EVS servers
@feedzinesocial
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