Live From Paris 2024: India’s Viacom 18 Is All-In on UHD, Delivering 20 UHD Streams Back Home

The UHD effort builds on cricket coverage of TATA India Premier League

India’s Viacom18 is all-in on UHD coverage for Paris 2024, delivering 20 UHD streams to consumers in India on the JioCinema OTT app and three streams for TV in HD 1080i, all with Dolby 5.1 immersive audio.

“That’s a carryover from what we started with cricket and the TATA IPL,” Siddharth Sharma, head of content and production, Viacom18 Sports, says of the UHD commitment. “We’ve got the full UHD package coming in from OBS to our switching-control room at IBC. Essentially, we’re creating our own little scheduling pattern and pushing out 20 streams to India.”

Viacom studios in Mumbai are using XR to help engage with Olympic fans in India in a deeper way.

Viacom18 aims to make Paris 2024 the biggest and, obviously, the best Olympic experience ever shown to an Indian audience, and all the innovations for the presentation are designed to keep the audience at the center.

“Fans are leaning into an engaging experience as they cheer for Indian athletes,” says Sharma. “The immersive coverage tipped off with a dedicated camera feed and correspondent on the India boat throughout the Opening Ceremony, giving viewers a ring-side view of the Indian contingent. The Opening Ceremony was covered across 18 channels on our network, besides JioCinema, our digital streaming platform.”

Speaking about the objective behind showcasing the event, he notes that an event of the size and scale of the Olympics often brings unprecedented complexities that Viacom18 tried to address with the most comprehensive presentation of the Olympics in India ever.

“With a chockablock schedule and several Indians in contention for medal positions,” he says, “we ensured that every Indian athlete in action is presented on one of our 20 feeds and that fans can seamlessly switch to their preferred sport. We also built JioCinema for this event, such that fans can not only track live action in a language of their choice but also follow the schedule of the day, medals tally, and results of the day right below the Livestream Player. A dedicated schedule banner showcasing all India events is also shown daily, thus ensuring the streaming platform acts as a one-stop shop for all things Olympics for viewers.”

Viacom18 has close to 20 people in Paris, some located at the IBC handling all the feeds and three ENG crews out covering Indian athletes and events that are of most interest back home. All original content in Paris is captured in 1080p and upconverted to 4K in Mumbai.

Viacom18’s team in Paris ensures that all the signals get to Mumbai at maximum quality.

“The idea is to cover sports of interest in India and also all Indian participating athletes,” explains Sandeep Srikanth, SVP, creative and production, Viacom18 Sports. “We’re not missing any Indian participation whatsoever.” Helping to get all 20 streams of content home are HEVC compression and 4-Gbps circuits.

“While we send 20 switched feeds to India,” he says, “we are further using those as a base to create three hyper-curated streams for TV and digital. Those feeds jump between sports depending on events that matter to India and customize the experience. One is India in Focus, which is always about Indian athletes or events of Indian importance; the other feed has an international focus. We are doing studio shows around both.”

About 500 people working on the Olympics from the broadcaster’s facility in Mumbai. Three studios and seven commentary booths zero in on covering the events, which begin at 11 a.m. in India and go until 3 a.m. The studio shows are available in English and Hindi; event commentary is also available in two regional languages: Tamil and Telugu.

The Mumbai studios deploy a mix of physical and green-screen studios, with XR and VR sets and extensions powered by Pixotope. The sets and backgrounds are a mix of the base TATA IPL studios delivered by Clickspring and Sequin AR and a new Paris 2024–focused virtual environment and graphics package delivered by long-term partner Wtvision India.

A Women’s Power Feed offers OTT viewers a continuous stream dedicated to female athletes and team events. “If the sport is there and we can show it,” says Srikanth, “we’ll show it to you.”

Two of the three ENG crews have cameras with LiveU units; the third has an Apple iPhone. For some events — for example, shooting, which is popular in India and requires deeper coverage but takes place in a distant venue — Srikanth has often deployed himself with the iPhone unit to allow the other ENG crews to be deployed to finals.

“It has worked better than expected,” he notes. “As long as there’s internet at the venue, you’re getting clean 1080p uploads and live two-ways from the mixed zones, which is all we want: you want that first reaction as quickly as possible.”

Viacom18 has used iPhones to give extra flexibility to its ENG efforts in Paris.

Sports popular back home include shooting, badminton, field hockey, table tennis, boxing, wrestling, and athletics events like javelin, whose defending Olympic champion is from India. As for workflow, Viacom18’s audio team embeds the English commentary on Ch. 15 and 16 via MADI at the IBC and pushes it to India, where a full submix is set up for final 5.1 and stereo delivery.