More than just a glorified sports day, the Paris 2024 Olympic Games saw the transformation of an entire city to host more than 10,000 athletes from 196 nations and 15.3 million spectators.

But the audience extends beyond just the spectators in the stadium. Globally, more than three billion people tuned in to watch Noah Lyles win 100-meter gold and pole vaulter Armand Duplantis break his own world record. The Olympics generated more than 300 million hours worth of video footage, with the first three days alone seeing a 79 percent surge in viewership compared to the Tokyo edition in 2020.

To prepare the city for audiences watching around the globe, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS), Intel, and Orange digitally transformed the Paris region to make its infrastructure gold medal-worthy.

Size does matter

Digitally transforming the city of Paris for the Olympics is made challenging by the sheer size and scale of the event.

Sotiris Salamouris, CTO at OBS, explains: “We are talking about more than 30 different sports, all requiring a different setup, different competition rules, different organizations, and different types of venues.”

Unlike football tournaments like the Euros and the World Cup, he says the infrastructure deployed must be able to be scaled both up and down depending on the event.

Bertrand Rojat, chief marketing and innovation officer at Orange for the Olympics, adds that infrastructure for the games was deployed across temporary venues, rather than the permanent venues seen at the Rugby World Cup earlier this year, presenting a whole new challenge.

Rojat provides the example of the River Seine, now ‘swimmable’ thanks to a $1.55 billion investment from the French government. The Seine had to have access to all the digital infrastructure available in a standard stadium or arena. During the Olympic opening ceremony, more than 200 Samsung S24 cameras were set up on boats to capture all the footage.

Salamouris tells DCD all of the venues for more than 32 sports are kitted out with “hundreds of cameras” that capture the action in 8K HDR with 9.1 immersive audio. This forms just part of the OBS’ on-premises technical setup.

“The volume of data we are generating in a single moment is huge. We’re talking about several hundreds of petabytes per second,” he says. And herein lies the second challenge.

The OBS, Salamouris says, “is both a production company and a technology company,” meaning its responsibility is to both create and distribute data from the Olympics.

But how did such large volumes of data traverse the globe, from trackside to local screens and televisions?

From track to telly

In addition to trackside cameras, Salamouris says each venue has “a technical IT setup” comprised of Intel hardware.

Intel has deployed its Xeon processors directly on-premises, allowing the data to be simultaneously encrypted and compressed as it happens.

Jean-Laurent Phillipe, CTO for the EMEA region at Intel, says: “The closer to the data that processing can happen, the better for latency and for avoiding communicating data over the Internet.”

Where it would normally require 48 gigabits per second of bandwidth, Phillipe says Intel has been able to reduce this to only 40 to 80 megabits per second thanks to compression at the Edge. In return, a replay can be generated and broadcast in five to 15 seconds.

Phillipe explains low latency is crucial and that there is only a small window of time between, for example, a Mexican football team’s goal and the next moment of play for the OBS to broadcast a replay of the action. In moments where spectators are waiting to see whether a goal is offside, Intel says its VVC encryption allows the data to reach its audience without losing any of its 8K quality.

The Xeon server CPUs also feature integrated AI capabilities. Philippe says, as a result, the servers do not “necessarily require additional discrete accelerators like GPUs to do part of the AI workloads.”

From the venue, the data is transported via Orange’s Private 5G and fiber links to the local International Broadcast Center (IBC).

Salamouris says the IBC is “where the heart of the broadcast actually beats” and is a temporary hub that follows the Olympic Games wherever they go.

The IBC this year is located in the Le Bourget Exhibition and Media Center, spanning 80,000 sqm on a 25-hectare plot in Northern Paris. Inside, there are seven smaller data centers, which Salamouris says are not too dissimilar from Edge deployments.

Phillipe says “Intel provides the ingredients” for the OBS to perform the majority of workloads in the IBC. This includes customizing broadcasts depending on their final destination, generation of complimentary graphics, short-form footage for social media, colorizing footage, and distributing archived content. A lot of these workloads rely on Intel’s Advance Volumetric Library Capture.

From the IBC, the data uses fiber networks to reach larger data centers in the Paris region, from which the OBS colocates. The specifics and locations of these data centers are a closely guarded secret.

Distributors and rights holders can access the data using Alibaba’s LiveCloud solution. The OBS LiveCloud is the main method of remote distribution for the Olympic Games.

The cloud provider said it distributed live broadcast signals to more than 200 countries and regions across the world, with cloud computing providing lower latency and higher resilience than previously used satellite methods.

The OBS LiveCloud was first used in the Tokyo 2020 games and is AI-enhanced, meaning fans will have access to content with AI-driven features for live spatial reconstruction and 3D rendering.

Salamouris describes the relationship between Alibaba Cloud, Intel, and the OBS as a “three-way discussion,” but adds that, beyond OBS broadcasts, broadcasters work with their own cloud providers

Finally, the data makes its way out of Paris and onto our screens, at speeds worthy of a world record holder.

Private 5G

In the Tokyo 2020 edition of the games, multiple telcos and operators were responsible for deploying 5G across the venues. This year, it all boils down to France’s homegrown network provider, Orange.

Rojat says Orange is providing “a full IP, very high throughput, 100 gigabit per second IP network, combined with a fiber and mobile network” to connect not only the IBC to on-premises IT infrastructure, but also to serve “the displays, the TVs, the catering, security services, payments, and ticketing.”

Essentially, everything is hosted on the same network, which Rojat explains is “fully centralized.” In other words, everything is managed remotely, configured remotely, and can be dynamically changed.

Rojat says this one big private 5G network is preferable to a WiFi deployment and as a result, Orange has enhanced the coverage of 5G services at all Olympic competition venues, maximizing the capacity of the network. In some of the temporary locations, Orange adopted its Cells on Wheels solution, which used temporary systems to provide high-capacity coverage.

During the games, French fiber cables were sabotaged causing widespread network outages. Orange said its network was not impacted by the outages.

For staff and security at the Olympic Games, Rojat says: “There will be 13,000 Push-To-Talk terminals, and for the first time they will be operating using a prioritized 4G network,” essentially transforming smartphones into walkie-talkies.

DCD visited the Orange Velodrome, otherwise known as the Stade Velodrome, earlier this year to see how Orange deployed the latest 5G and Edge technology. Rojat says a great deal of Orange’s capabilities, like Push-To-Talk, were tested during the 2023 Rugby World Cup and scaled up for the Olympic Games.

Much of Intel’s AI capabilities are also made possible by Orange’s 5G network. The company also deployed its AI capabilities around the venues to create an application for the visually impaired. The application uses AI to provide people with live navigation around Paris and the Olympic venues.

“It uses the cell phone and the camera of the cell phone, meaning that most, if not all, of the inference will be done directly on the cell phone, not relying much on any connection to the data center. That is to me, the extreme case of being closer to the Edge,” says Phillipe.

Intel also deployed an AI chatbot on-site for the athletes. The chatbot served to improve the Olympic experience from an operational perspective for the athletes and the staff.

Atos currently has three sites in operation for the Olympic Games. Two of these, the CTOC (Central Technology Operations Center) and the ITL (Integration Testing Lab) are permanent locations in Barcelona and Madrid, respectively. The newly built TOC (Technology Operations Center) in Paris is connected to both these existing facilities. The facilities look after the IT systems at the Olympics from an operational perspective.

DCD reached out to Atos but did not hear back.

Telling the Olympic story

Digitalizing an entire city and deploying an entire “ecosystem” of digital infrastructure is about telling the Olympic story, says Salamouris, and at the heart of everything the OBS does is carrying an age-old legacy for generations to come. Beyond all the national teams that participated in the 2024 edition, there is a team comprised of the OBS, Intel, Alibaba Cloud, Orange, and Atos that told the Olympic story to audiences around the world.