No event attracts more viewers than the Summer Olympics. The 2024 Olympics in Paris will reach almost half the world’s population: the International Olympic Committee expects 3.9 to 4.5 billion television viewers.
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Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), a company founded by the International Olympic Committee, broadcasts the sporting event live and digitally around the world. It enriches the video signal with slow motion, still images and 3D visuals. It also provides real-time information on disciplines, player names, location and time.
To accomplish all of this, OBS works with partner companies such as chip maker Intel and software company Alibaba. For Paris 2024, OBS plans to produce more than 11,000 hours of content, 15 percent more than the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Videos are available in different resolution levels – in some cases even in 8K.
compression by a factor of a thousand
AI servers with fourth and fifth generation Intel Xeon processors prepare 8K live signals to broadcast around the world. OBS renders 60 images per second in HDR with 32 audio channels in different languages. The resolution of 7680 x 4320 pixels is four times higher than 4K and corresponds to approximately 33 megapixels.
This results in raw data in the amount of 48 Gbit/s. The servers compress them to 40 to 60 Mbit/s using the H.266/VVC process (Versatile Video Coding) – about one thousandth of the original data rate. According to Intel, it currently takes about 400 milliseconds for a live transmission.
Servers with Intel Xeon processors compress 8K video provided by OBS by a factor of 1000.
On the receiver side, Intel specifies exactly which hardware is used to decode the highly compressed signal, for example a CPU from the Core i9 series. The whole thing is not yet a mass event, but rather has the character of a technology study: OBS only streams selected events in individual locations in 8K.
Video streams in the cloud
Broadcasters primarily receive video and audio feeds in full HD via the OBS Live Cloud. Chinese company Alibaba developed OBS Cloud 3.0 in collaboration with OBS for the Olympic Games in Paris. It debuted at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo and two years later at the Winter Games in Beijing.
US election campaign: Trump announces TV duel against HarrisThis method has now replaced satellite streaming, which was introduced in Tokyo in 1964, as the main transmission method. According to Alibaba, two-thirds of radio and television broadcasters booked OBS Live Cloud in 2024. A total of 379 video and 100 audio feeds came together. The video stream is divided into 11 UHD and 368 HD transmissions.
In Olympic broadcasting services, all aspects of the live broadcast of a sporting event come together. The IOC subsidiary wants to produce more than 11,000 hours of content in total.
AI filters out highlights of a sporting event
In addition to the live video stream, the cloud provides a whole range of additional information. Behind the somewhat cumbersome name “OBS Multi-Camera Replay System” is software that provides slow-motion replays and still images for 14 locations and 21 disciplines. These include rugby, badminton, athletics, basketball, beach volleyball, table tennis, tennis, wrestling, judo, breaking, BMX freestyle and skateboarding. The AI ​​system creates a spatial interpretation from the video data to output a 3D rendered version.
The video data contains information such as timestamps and the names of athletes and sports, which is often still entered manually. Artificial intelligence also analyzes and evaluates each live broadcast: Intel’s AI platform Getty selects what the highlights are based on video and audio data such as athlete movement, the sound of a whistle or murmuring in the audience.
The AI ​​records the names of all athletes and rates their actions up to five stars. With the help of this metadata, television studios can later, for example, filter out an athlete’s best scenes from a pile of video material for a documentary. Such highlight videos can be found in all disciplines, for example on the Sportschau and Sportstudio YouTube channels.
Digital athlete data
In Tokyo, for the first time, live reporting tracked and animated athletes’ movements using colored stripes. Behind this is Intel’s “3D Athlete Tracking” (3DAT), which monitors 21 points on the athlete’s body.
Behind the scenes, 3DAT helps select and train athletes. The organizing committee used Intel software ahead of the 2026 Summer Youth Olympic Games in Dakar to identify promising talent.
Young athletes from eight locations competed in six disciplines each. Using video recordings, 3DAT evaluated criteria such as their reaction time and speed. Intel compared the results to AI models that had been trained with gold medal winners.
Intel’s 3DAT software uses video recordings to evaluate 21 points on a recorded athlete’s body to assess their athletic abilities.
(Image: Image: Intel)
Thus 40 students out of 1000 were selected. If the system proves itself, it should soon set a precedent. And 8K live video streams are also likely to replace the previous full HD standard in the long term.
Transparency note: The author was invited by Intel to the Summer Olympics in Paris. Intel covered the travel expenses. There were no specifics regarding the type and scope of our reporting.
(AKR)
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