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For nearly a century, the modern Olympic Games have showcased technological innovations alongside human achievement, and broadcast advances have played a big part in that. The Olympic Games Berlin 1936 was the first televised sporting event (“broadcast” over closed-circuit to remote venues); the Olympic Winter Games in 1960 introduced the “instant replay;” and Tokyo 1964—the “TV Olympics”—were the first to be broadcast internationally by satellite (via Syncom 3, the first geostationary communications satellite).
The Olympic Games Paris 2024 build on that legacy with the debut of the first-ever end-to-end 8K livestreaming experience using VVC (Versatile Video Coding) standard to selected locations spanning four continents, and an automatic highlights generation system that will allow Olympic Broadcasting Services to deliver an unprecedented amount of custom content worldwide—both powered by Intel® AI platforms.
Automatic highlights generation: custom content everywhere
If you’re an Olympic or Paralympic Games fan who lives for a sport like badminton, table tennis or cycling, you know the feeling of staying up until the wee hours of the morning to catch a final match, or you’ve made do with a few seconds of highlights boiled down from the hours of grueling competition you’ve been looking forward to for four years.
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The challenge comes down to scale. The Olympic Games is the biggest sporting event in the world, and the sheer amount of footage is truly overwhelming. OBS plans to capture more than 11,000 hours of content at Paris 2024—that’s the equivalent of 458 full days, produced over just 17 days of competition. That’s far more footage than can be broadcast.
“A lot of times you have to prioritize what's going to get the most eyeballs, and that really undermines some sports from getting the coverage that they deserve,” says Courtney Willock, Head of Broadcast Technology, Intel Olympic & Paralympic Games Office. Our platform helps ensure that we are giving the right content to the right audience, depending on the interests of each market."
That challenge changes starting with the Paris Games, where Intel’s AI platform for broadcast production and editing will enable automatic highlights generation that can deliver custom content focused on the sports and athletes that fans in each region care about. The technology can also free human editors from the time-consuming tasks of logging, enabling them to tell the human stories that drive lifelong engagement with the Olympic Games. Using the platform, OBS can deliver localized content to rights holders—and audiences—in more than 200 countries and territories.
“The platform takes three sources of information: video, audio and data,” says Willock, “and then using AI, identifies events and the actions of individual competitors to make a decision on what is the most relevant based on criteria that are set—and the criteria that are allowed in the platform are extensive.”
That means unprecedented flexibility, with producers able to fine-tune the system on the fly, even without specialized training. “We’re automating things that otherwise wouldn't have coverage, wouldn't have highlights,” Willock tells us. “Now you can say I want to be able to serve all these different appetites; you just set criteria for all of those ahead of time with a few clicks.”
We are using the Olympics as a gateway to solve some of the most complex challenges in the technical world. Intel is one of the only companies on the planet that can do it end-to-end because we have data center to client to edge and everything in between to define the future of the broadcast industry.
Ravindra Velhal, Intel
8K video: detail that beats the naked eye
Ever lose a contact lens? Ever lose a contact lens in the heat of elite judo competition during the Olympic Games?
“In Tokyo, when the first judo match started,” says Intel Global Content Strategist Ravindra Velhal, “one of the judoka dropped her contact lens on the tatami mat during the competition. And not only did the 8K camera capture that contact lens, but we could actually see markings on that contact lens.”
The episode underscores the ultimate promise of 8K video: staggeringly high resolution. That means more lifelike reproduction with unprecedented realism and detail—enough detail to spot a lost contact lens from across the world.
All that resolution means a ton of data—an 8K image is 7,680 pixels wide by 4,320 pixels tall: that’s four times the resolution of a 4K image, which in turn has four times the resolution of a standard HD frame. It adds up to 33 million pixels, and at 60 frames per second with HDR (High Dynamic Range) 10 bit and multi-channel immersive audio, that’s up to 48 Gbps per second RAW—a serious challenge for livestreaming.
The raw signal from OBS’s 8K cameras goes up to the Intel Broadcast Server at IBC, where it’s encoded on servers powered by Intel® Xeon® processors, using Intel® AMX AI accelerator and Deep Learning Boost (Intel® DL Boost) technology. The workflow is able to compress that incoming 48 Gbps 8K stream on the fly (the process takes within 200-400 milliseconds) to a 40-60 megabyte per second stream for distribution using the latest H.266/VVC (Versatile Video Coding) standards.
“We get the signal at 48 Gigabit per second RAW from OBS,” says Velhal, “and from there, everything downstream we basically handle. Technically, we can take any 8K live sports and events feed directly to our server-based workflow and deliver globally on our own.”
The world is still at the beginning of 8K adoption, and while outside of the Japanese market there aren’t many 8K OTT devices yet, viewers with select Intel-powered desktops—powered by the 14th Gen Intel® Core™ I9 with Intel® Arc GPU, Intel® Core™ Ultra processors-based laptops connected to 8K TV—are in luck. Those machines are capable enough to decode 8K content, enabling viewers to experience the full, rich detail of the broadcasts of the future right now.
Looking to the future: beyond the biggest stage
The Olympic Games—the world’s biggest athletic stage—offers a jumping-off point for future innovations. These advances pave the way for a better, richer, more immersive, more personalized experience for sports fans everywhere—and for the future of television.
“We are using the Olympics as a gateway to solve some of the most complex challenges in the technical world,” says Velhal. “Intel is one of the only companies on the planet that can do it end-to-end because we have data center to client to edge and everything in between to define the future of the broadcast industry.”
“The automatic highlights generation platform is already well-established around the world, but this is the first time it's being applied at the Olympic Games,” says Willock. “It’s a great testimonial for how it manages diversity of competition, diversity of events, and simultaneous content.”
“There’s a real opportunity,” says Sarah Vickers, leader of Intel’s Olympic and Paralympic Games Program, “to show the breadth of our technology capabilities and then take those examples and show our customers and partners how we can scale. The opportunities are extensive for getting much more customized content to that fan at home. And if you think about some countries that don’t have big broadcast budgets, they’ll be able to get customized AI feeds that let them tell that country’s story for the day. And that’s content that might not have been produced before.”
Learn more about the ways Intel’s AI platforms are powering the Olympics.
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