Live From Paris 2024: OBS CTO Sotiris Salamouris Reflects on the Technical Legacy of the Games
The massive Opening Ceremony prep, the role of ST 2110 and IP, and the virtualized future of production
The Paris Olympics are over, and, for the OBS team, there is a brief moment to reflect on its accomplishments before the Paralympics begin on Aug. 28. It gives SVG a chance to chat with OBS CTO Sotiris Salamouris about the multi-year effort that produced a nice return to normalcy after the past two the Olympics: the Tokyo 2020 Summer Games and the Beijing 2022 Winter Games were severely affected by the pandemic and, without fans in the stands, lacked much of the energy that transforms an Olympics into something special.
OBS’s Sotiris Salamouris in the video-quality-control area at the Paris 2024 IBC
“Empty venues impact us quite negatively in terms of how the sports appear,” he says. “Having fans creates an excitement that gets all the way up to the way that we’re doing the production. It affects the producers; it affects the directors, even the camera people. It doesn’t change the technical setup, but it absolutely contributes to the quality of the final production. Here in Paris, there is also the beauty of the city, and it’s amazing how you see that reflected in the production.”
In the Beginning…
Displaying the beauty of the Paris Olympics began on July 24, when some competitions began outside of Paris as well as at the Stade de France. But, on Friday, July 26, the Opening Ceremony took place, and the production made waves — both literally and figuratively. Historically, Opening Ceremonies have taken place in a stadium, and certain protocols are observed: an artistic segment reflecting the host city or nation, a parade of nations and athletes, the official opening the Games.
That was not what happened this year. Instead of being held in a stadium, the Opening Ceremony took place on a nearly 8-km-long portion of the Seine, from the Pont d’Austerlitz to the Pont d’Iena. The parade of nations comprised the Olympic teams on boats, artistic elements were performed both on the river and alongside it for the entire route, and the parade culminated at the Trocadero area with the Eiffel Tower in the background.
“What was very different in this ceremony was that the parade was mixed with the artistic elements,” Salamouris points out. “That added another dimension of complexity especially if we also consider that on top that we had the aerial operation of seven drones and three helicopters which were also part of our plan.”
The drones and helicopters were part of a massive production plan for, arguably, the largest single-day event ever produced for television. Covering the route required hundreds of cameras, hundreds of microphones, and a lot of signal transport.
A fleet of gyrostabilized boats with cameras and microphones captured views of the Opening Ceremony from the Seine. (Photo: OBS)
“We had close to 120 standard broadcast cameras that are deployed for events like this,” he explains, “but we had 220 additional mobile phones that were also live broadcast sources. And we deployed around 450 microphones. It was a massive number of video plus audio sources. Any kind of technology that works for a live event was used. We had wired connections but also wireless, and we even had a private 5G network along the route as well as at preparation zones.”
Besides the coverage from the shore and bridges and the mobile phones on the boats, the teams motoring down the Seine were covered by six camera boats deployed as chase boats. Four of them had three gyrostabilized robotic cameras each, mounted on a truss atop the boat (shading took place on the boats, but camera control was done remotely from the Opening Ceremony compound near the Trocadéro); the fifth boat had two cameras. The sixth boat served as a landing zone for the drone.
Seven wireless receive sites located along the route ensured that signals were brought back to shore and to the long fiber running along the Seine to the IBC. Featuring 740-strand fiber, the ring began to be installed as soon as the OBS team learned of the plan to have the Ceremony on the Seine.
“Before we saw the production plan,” Salamouris says, “we put the fiber in. That saved the show because it is an amazing number of strands put in by our telecom partner, Orange. All the content from the wired cameras that were deployed in the river or from the wired receivers along the river were connected to that network.”
The compound was built on a massive IP-based infrastructure, with three interconnected production units.
“It was all IP and SMPTE ST 2110,” he says, “with a spine-leaf topology where the spine is implented in two layers: the upper [layer] could also be described as a super spine. It had all the signals coming from the river, plus any signals from the Trocadéro area like the cameras in the grandstands all connected to that multi-layer spine-leaf network. All the cameras and signals were available in all three galleries, so they all had access to the same signals depending on what they were doing. In addition, there was of course a DR (Disaster Recovery) option that could be engaged in extreme circumstances if there was a major emergency with our Trocadero facilities.”
All the production planning in the world, of course, can be disrupted by inclement weather, and that happened with Paris 2024: there was a steady, soaking rain for just about the entire Opening Ceremony. Fortunately, the weather in the days prior and the day of had been relatively clear, allowing final preparation to take place. However, about two hours prior to the Ceremony, the heavens opened up, and everyone involved — production crew, athletes, fans — was challenged in a new way.
“There was a good plan about protecting all the cameras lenses, microphones, and personnel,” says Salamouris. “It proved to be very good because nobody was expecting four continuous hours of rain. All the restrictions about moving made it hard to swap things, but we were very happy because the system held for four hours. We lost some microphones, ended up losing some cameras, but we always managed to recover.
Production crews worked from three interconnected galleries. (Photo: OBS)
“There was a kind of continuous fight behind the scenes,” he continues, “to maintain the systems and get them back if we would lose them because of small malfunctions or if we needed to clean up or dry connectors. There was also a struggle to keep the lenses clean because so much water was getting on the lenses. Someone would climb up the camera truss and clean the camera, but, three minutes later, it was covered with water again.”
The Opening Ceremony was very dynamic and very stressful, he adds, noting that, in the end, everything worked well, demonstrating the power of technology and the resilience of the production team.
“I have no words to praise them enough for what they managed to pull through!,” says Salamouris. “Our producers, our directors, and the whole production team not only had to cope successfully with a very complex show, but they also managed to do so under the most adverse conditions and under the need for continuous adjustments because of the constant rain. It was an amazing achievement and my highest kudos and respect for what they have managed to accomplish that night!”
Salamouris says people’s efforts alone are not sufficient if the underlying technology is not resilient enough to cope in such conditions while also considering the high volumes, the great geographical spread and the large complexity and scale of the ceremony.
“It’s also one more reason why we’re quite happy about the adoption of IP because this type of ceremony could never have happened without it,” he says.
ST 2110 Shines
The massive effort by OBS delivered nearly 5,000 feeds to rightsholders either in Paris or back home in a variety of ways: SMPTE ST 2022, SMPTE ST 2110, SRT, HLS for mobile device services, and more. Managing and delivering that many feeds would have been impossible in an SDI environment, says Salamouris, although an SDI handoff to rightsholders was available via 12-Gbps SDI for UHD services and standard SDI for those wanting 1080i.
“The old SDI world for us is kind of dead,” he says. “There is no way we can manage this complexity and this volume of distribution in a live environment using old technology. Everything is ST 2110, and we convert it only at the edge. But we see more and more broadcasters taking ST 2110 directly, and they also see a big difference in the ease of use because they no longer have to deal with a big spaghetti of cables to receive all the multilateral signals.
Salamouris sees SDI staying around for several years because the technology is robust and a solid fit for smaller productions. When scale is important, however, ST 2110 is the only option.
“We tend to think of IP as less robust because we have ideas based on the reliability of networks in our homes or that they break easily,” he explains. “But that’s not the reality. The nature of IP is, when it comes to video, more robust. Once you have a piece of content — video or audio — and a timestamp, that content can go anywhere via IP and be mixed, matched, and regenerated. It’s indestructible if you just follow some rather simple approaches to building your IP system, and you can scale it as big as you want. With SDI, you need a signal flow from point A to point C, and every node in that signal flow has to be greatly engineered; if there are any problems anywhere, the whole flow is destroyed.”
Equipment, like this jib camera, were protected from the rain. (Photo: OBS)
For an organization like OBS, the move to IP allowed new services to be created and deployed much more easily. Salamouris cites this year’s launch of cloud-based distribution of the multilateral content feeds via Alibaba cloud services as an example. The service is a second option to satellite delivery of the MDS signals and has been a hit, with 54 rightsholders taking cloud-delivered signals via the Alibaba Cloud versus only 33 for the legacy satellite service.
Rightsholders could either take the full VANDA package and channels or choose specific signals, which would become router destinations accessed via a software panel provided by OBS. There were 380 feeds going through the cloud plus 11 in UHD (a total of around 8.6 Gbps), and the rightsholder could choose from four regions where the cloud signals were available, ensuring that they had an option that was relatively close geographically.
OBS Team Delivers Gold
The technologies are great, but, as everyone in sports production understands, great tech is nothing without great people behind it. Paris 2024 involved more than 8,000 people just for the OBS production of the events and content in France. “It’s a huge number of people,” says Salamouris, “and they have performed great. All of them are very experienced. Many of them have been in the field for many years.”
For an event where thousands of professionals create thousands of hours of content, the key is preparation and a reliable infrastructure that allows them to easily resolve the inevitable crisis. Redundancy and resiliency over the technical infrastructure go a long way toward solving issues quickly.
“You cannot expect that everybody will be a superhuman for everything,” he adds. “While we do expect them to put their soul and spirit into the Games, we need to have the infrastructure for them to work as well as expected. The infrastructure has to be planned in a way that helps people faced with an incident to be able to handle it; there are many incidents even the best super-professional will not be able to handle. It’s a combination of things to get the best out of people because we can’t expect them to do miracles.”
The Technical Legacy
Every Olympic Games has a legacy, not only culturally but also technically. An event like the Olympics is the ultimate showcase and test bed for new services. Over the years, that has included both hits — HD, UHD, HDR, 8K, surround sound — and misses — 3D, VR. Deep within the bones of OBS is an organization that takes a step forward in response to the needs of rightsholders. Simply put, if rightsholders demand a service (and are, of course, willing to help pay for it) OBS will do what it can to deliver that service.
Salamouris suggests a couple of takeaways from this year’s Games, beginning with the move to IP and the new frontier it opens: “The full maturity of IP solutions is done and dusted in our case. These Games are the beginning of our next phase, which is moving in the direction of virtualization of our infrastructure. Our Virtual OB Van project is a step toward more software-defined, and all the technology deployed here proved that we are on the right path for that.”
Camera operators braved the elements at the Trocadéro. (Photo: OBS)
Also, on his list of successes is demonstrating that true 4K UHD production is possible and makes a difference. “Everything here was UHD HDR,” he points out. “We strongly believe that this is the right format for a top-quality event like the Olympics. I fully understand the appeal of 1080p, and I understand that there are some limitations, but, if you can do better, then you should do better.”
Among other advances Salamouris notes are the stroboscopic coverage of key sports, virtual lines that helped tell the story (especially on sailing), and the use of AI-enhanced graphics to “pin” data to athletes.
“There is a lot of things happening with AI on the backend, which is AI that we’re using to make our workflow more efficient. [For example,] automated highlights, which we did with Intel, have been very successful and popular. Now we have these two AI technologies: one is traditional machine learning; the other, the LLM or language learning models. We are using both of them to create new content and provide much more of it than we are traditionally expected.”