The 2024 Paris Summer Olympics kick off on July 26 and go until August 11. Hundreds of events will take place over the course of a few weeks, many of them occurring simultaneously. It’s a lot for any sports fan to keep up with. And this year, there are more places than ever to watch.
In the past, Olympics broadcasts have floundered when trying to satisfy audiences. NBC, the main broadcaster of the Olympics in the US, has gotten flak for its programming strategy during Games past by spreading the events out over too many TV channels and delaying some coverage until prime time instead of presenting the Games the way most people prefer to watch their sports: live. But this time, NBC and other broadcasters seem eager to make it much easier to find what you want to see, when you want to see it.
Online platforms are going for the gold this year as well. TikTok has an Olympics hub. In the weeks leading up to the Games, the Instagram account @olympics has been posting training videos and action stills to its 8.2 million followers. NBC is partnering with creators across social media to cover events and to spin up content from Paris. Google will showcase live scores, medal ceremonies, and highlights within search results and inside the answers to queries handled by its Assistant. It’s a full buffet.
“We are going through a period where one of the most interesting, but to some extent also problematic, elements is the extreme segmentation of the audience,” says Yiannis Exarchos, the CEO of the Olympic Broadcasting Service, the organization that produces and manages media output for the Olympics. “You have audiences all over the place, consuming content in different ways, and there are very few opportunities where you can really bring together large audiences.”
The Olympics, he says, is one of those opportunities. The biggest change to Olympics coverage is that there is simply going to be much more of it. The total run time of the various competitions in the Olympic games will clock in at around 3,800 hours. The OBS plans to turn that into more than 11,000 hours of content—a mixture of live coverage, behind-the-scenes features, narrated analysis, and highlights.
Anyone tuning in will need a way to sift through it all. NBC wants to make that easier on its Peacock streaming platform and has debuted a bunch of new viewing options that will let users curate their own Olympics coverage, in addition streaming nearly every event live from the Olympics and the Paralympics. (The Paralympics, also taking place in Paris, start on August 28.)
In the Peacock Olympics hub, viewers can sort listings by sport, athlete, or country to find the events they want to watch and then add them to a watch list. This lets viewers create their own schedule to watch events live, as well as a place where they can come back to watch their chosen events later. Viewers can also watch up to four live events on the same screen using a new Multiview tool that makes it easy to flip between concurrent events.
The OBS is producing its video content in ultrahigh definition and high dynamic range, which should spruce up the level of detail and color in every shot. Content is also being captured in all manner of formats: vertical video for watching clips on phones, 8K video for the highest-definition broadcasts, and 360-degree shots for truly immersive drama.
The OBS says it has more than doubled the multi-camera systems it uses to capture multiple angles of the action for super-slow-motion replays later. It will also use cinematic camera lenses, which are capable of capturing artsier shots, like enhanced depth-of-field changes that you’ve probably seen in movies. The struggle to make that happen with traditional sports cameras is that the time typically needed to process those complex shots has prevented them from being used in live production. But the OBS is relying on AI and cloud technologies to speed up the processing time enough to use these shots within its live coverage. Exarchos says its new processes enable shots that were hitherto impossible to capture and present live, like 360-degree replays that spin the viewer around the athlete while they’re sailing through the air.
“The effect that exists in the Matrix film that you could do in cinema, you can be doing live,” Exarchos says.
The OBS is also recording sounds in 5.1.4 audio, with the goal of capturing immersive audio from the venues during events and during interviews with athletes on the sidelines. That, along with things like augmented-reality stations that give people a view of what it is like on the Olympic grounds, are meant to make those at home feel like they’re closer to the games.
“If we repeat the previous—very successful—games, we have failed,” Exarchos says. “Because as in sports, everything is about breaking new ground, breaking new frontiers, and going one step further.”
Tech Proving Grounds
As you’d expect in 2024, artificial intelligence tools will be used extensively during the Olympics.
Broadcasters like the Olympic Broadcasting Service and NBC will use AI to pull together highlights that scrape thousands of hours of footage to find key moments, package them up nicely, and deliver them straight to the viewer. Some companies have gone all in on AI offerings; NBC will be using the AI-rendered voice of legendary sportscaster Al Michaels to narrate its highlights packages on Peacock. The team trained its generative AI voice engine using Michaels’ past appearances on television broadcasts, and the results sound smooth yet still unmistakably uncanny.
As you watch the games live, AI will be able to conjure up key info in real time and display it on screen: stats about the athletes, probability percentages that they’ll make the shot or beat the clock, and artificially augmented views of what is happening on the ground. The AI incursion extends beyond the games; NBC is incorporating AI into its ad platform, with the goal of better personalizing the ads that play during the breaks.
This exorbitant broadcasting bacchanal is still a training ground for these new technologies. NBC is using the Olympics as the first major test of its Multiview capability and user customization features, so expect to see those things appear more often in regular live sports broadcasts. According to a rep from NBC, the company’s hope is that the technology debuting during the Paris Olympics could be deployed to other live sports events, and even non-sports shows like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.
Ultimately, Exarchos says, the goal of these technologies is to make people feel more connected to these events and the people participating in them, especially after the last two Olympics games were mired by pandemic restrictions that limited who could attend.
“We're going through a phase where people have a huge desire and nostalgia to relieve physical experiences, especially with other people.” Exarchos says. “Sports is a big catalyst for that.”
