Paris 2024: A Look at a Century of Olympics Sound and Picture

When the Games debuted on broadcast in 1924, radio was in its ‘tweens’

As broadcasters from all over the world cover the action in all 35 venues of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, it’s a moment to look back at coverage of the Games a century ago, when broadcasting itself was still in its “tween” years.

In fact, it was from the Paris 1924 Olympics that radio first beamed the action, belated as it was. The telegraph was still being used to distribute results and scores. Radio Paris, founded the year before, essentially invented Olympics broadcast commentary with journalist Edmond Dehorter, and, every evening, the BBC summarized the day’s events, according to the Olympics Museum.

Aside from the fact that bulky tube-powered broadcast equipment and equally cumbersome carbon microphones made remote production a kind of Manhattan Project, newspapers — the dominant media of the day — compelled the Beeb to broadcast bulletins only after 6 p.m. so as not to compete with their late editions. That mentality continued through the Los Angeles 1932 Summer Olympics, when papers dreaded being “scooped” by radio and the Games’ organizers feared that live radio broadcasts would hurt ticket sales.

That concern was shared by MLB owners, who prohibited live radio during regular-season games, and by some Ivy League universities, including Harvard and Yale, which in 1932 decided that they would not allow any of their football games to be broadcast on radio that fall. (NBC and CBS, however, did manage to provide live coverage of the 1932 Winter Olympics.)

TV Coverage of the Games

Television came into the picture — so to speak — for the Berlin 1936 Summer Olympics, when selected events were beamed live to athletes in the Olympic Village and to the wider public watching in 25 special “public auditoriums” and beer halls equipped with screens in Berlin, Potsdam, and Leipzig. On radio, the opening-day ceremonies in 1936 were heard in Los Angeles at 8 a.m. Pacific Time via NBC on both KFI and KECA; KHJ listeners heard the CBS-network feed from Germany.

For the Paris 1924 Olympic Games, results and scores were sent from the telegraph and telephone room at the Colombes Stadium (Photo: Getty Images/WSJ)

Television picked up the pace after the 1940 and 1946 Olympics were canceled because of World War II. In 1948, Olympic images from the London Games were transmitted directly into homes for the first time, live from Wembley Stadium and the Empire Pool.

“Already, things were moving beyond the simple factual broadcast of the day’s events,” the Olympic Museum notes. “Filming was live, angles and perspectives were multiplied, stories were told.”

And they were film cameras. Actual video cameras, using the then-state-of-the-art Image Orthicon–tube camera developed by RCA, were deployed by broadcaster RAI for the first time at the 1956 Winter Games in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. Four cameras were installed along the bobsled track, allowing television viewers to follow almost all the race as it unfolded.

Rome 1960 was the first Olympics to be broadcast live across Europe, using 40 black-and-white cameras, 11 mobile units, and 11 video recorders and providing slow motion for the first time. (It was also the first time that TV overtook radio as primary broadcast medium for Olympics coverage.) Coverage was delayed to the U.S., with video cassettes flown via commercial airliner to New York, where ABC’s Jim McKay added commentary.

Tokyo 1964 was the first to reach a worldwide audience, via the first satellite broadcasts (over Syncom 3, the first geostationary communication satellite). Color television arrived four years later at the Mexico City 1968 Games, for which wireless, hand-held color cameras were deployed for the first time.

At the Munich 1972 Games, 25 competition venues were equipped with television cameras. The other 10 had cinema equipment, but all were used for television broadcasts using film-to-tape transfers. At the 1972 Winter Games in Sapporo, Japan, helmet-mounted minicams were introduced for the Alpine downhill-skiing competition, underscoring Japan’s growing dominance in miniaturized electronics. That trend was inflective for the growing awareness that viewers wanted to get ever closer to the action.

(Summer and Winter Olympics were usually held in the same years until 1994, when they began to alternate two years apart. Though driven by advertising dollars, the change helped establish the Winter Olympics as a broadcast-sports entity. The 1994 Winter Games in Lillehammer, Norway, were broadcast in more than 120 countries and, for the first time, to the African continent.)

Enter Olympic Broadcasting Services

After that, the momentum of technological advance gained real steam. For the Seoul 1988 Summer Olympics, public broadcaster KBS built a state-of-the-art, nine-story complex, its nearly 700,000 sq. ft. housing four TV studios, 14 radio studios, and a 2,000-seat auditorium. For Barcelona 1992, CDD cameras, normally used in astronomy, made their appearance, as did digital video recorders.

Throughout the 20th century, national and regional broadcasters managed the Olympics broadcasts. In 2001, that changed: the International Olympic Committee established its own filming and broadcasting service, Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), making coverage of the Games no longer dependent solely on the host country. That, in turn, accelerated the pace of technology deployed for the Games.

The Beijing 2008 Games were the first to be produced and broadcast entirely in HDTV. London 2012 experimented with multichannel audio and 8K cameras, and live broadcasting in 3D was tested for the first time. The Opening and Closing Ceremonies and the men’s 100-meter race were among the events covered with this new technology, being broadcast on a separate television channel. Spectators were able to watch a 3D broadcast of the Games at the Panasonic full-HD 3D Theatre in the Olympic Park. The Sochi 2014 Winter Games marked another inflection point: the first time the Olympics had more hours of internet coverage than television broadcasts.

The Next 100 Years: Immersive and Inclusive

That brings us to the start of the next 100 years of Olympics media. NBCUniversal’s coverage of the XXXIII Olympic Summer Games from Paris are available in a variety of advanced video and audio formats, providing a multiple-platform viewing experience from facilities that look and sound like Star Wars compared with what technicians and producers once had to work with. It also marks advances in streaming:

• Primetime coverage is streamed live on Peacock in 1080p HDR with Dolby Atmos sound.
• Morning and daytime coverage streams live on Peacock in 1080p HDR with 5.1 surround sound.
• Gold Zone, a daily whip-around show featuring the most exciting Olympic moments as they’re happening, streams on Peacock in 1080p HDR and 5.1 surround sound, with HDR and Atmos supported on selected X1, FireTV, LG, Roku, and Samsung devices.

Audio also is advancing and improving. From July 24 to Aug. 11 for the Olympics and Aug. 28–Sept. 8 for the Paralympics, NBC will deliver more than 400 hours of programming in 4K HDR with Dolby Atmos audio. For its Olympics production, more than 600 microphones, including the immersive Audio-Technica 8.0-surround mic, are deployed to capture on-field action and experiences.

NBCUniversal’s coverage of Paris 2024 is accessible to more viewers of all abilities than ever before, providing enhanced closed captioning, extended audio description, and improved digital-content accessibility. Closed captioning is available for all Olympic and Paralympic events airing across NBCU’s broadcast and cable networks. In addition, closed captioning is provided for all digital live streams with commentary across Peacock, NBCSports.com, and the NBC Sports app.

For Paris 2024, more audio description services — interspersing broadcast audio with voices describing Olympic and Paralympic scenes and context — are available for visually impaired viewers than for any previous Games. All coverage on NBC features audio description provided by Descriptive Video Works. In a first for a U.S. broadcaster, audio descriptions are in stereo, enhancing the quality of the sound for viewers. For the Paralympic Games, NBC Sports will provide live audio description for all broadcast and cable programming, including that airing outside primetime hours, as well as on all simulstreams.

Additionally, improved web-content accessibility— keyboard navigation, color contrast, support for screen readers — is available on NBCOlympics.com, NBC.com, and the NBC Sports app.

“Providing paths for the widest possible audience in the U.S. to enjoy the Olympic and Paralympic Games continues to be a key goal of our Olympics mission,” says NBC Olympics President Gary Zenkel. “Offering closed captioning on all live coverage with the most audio description ever is another important way we are cultivating inclusivity in our production.”

Says Comcast VP, Accessibility, Tom Wlodkowski, “For over a decade, Comcast has been committed to making the moments that matter accessible to everyone, and NBCUniversal’s enhanced accessibility features for this year’s Olympic and Paralympic Games are a part of this mission. NBCUniversal’s team approached these features with an inclusive lens to ensure that the enhancements meet the needs of our customers. As a user of the audio description features myself, I could not be more excited to share in the joy that the Paris Olympics will bring.”