In the early morning of July 27th, the Paris Olympics officially opened with the #Graphic Summer Collection Order#. This year, cloud broadcasting will officially surpass satellite broadcasting as the main way to broadcast Olympic events to billions of viewers around the world. The 11,000 hours of live streaming of the Paris Olympics will be distributed globally through Alibaba Cloud. This will be another major technological advance since the 1964 Olympic Games began to be broadcast on satellite television.
According to reports, OBS LiveCloud will become the main way to remotely distribute live signals for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, and two-thirds of the scheduled remote services will be delivered through cloud computing. Based on Alibaba Cloud's global public cloud infrastructure, the Olympic broadcast cloud will support the transmission of Olympic live signals from Paris to more than 200 countries and regions around the world, reaching billions of viewers.
（奥林匹克广播服务公司CEO Yiannis Exarchos）
For the first time ever! Cloud broadcasting surpasses satellite broadcasting
During the Paris Olympics, Alibaba Cloud and Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) jointly built OBS Cloud became an important infrastructure for the global broadcast of the Paris Olympics. OBS Cloud was put into use for the first time during the Tokyo Olympics, which was also the first time that Alibaba Cloud was used to support global broadcasting of the Olympic Games, which is regarded as an important step for the Olympic Games to enter the digital age. Now, the newly upgraded OBS Cloud 3.0 will support the largest cloud broadcast in history during the Paris Olympics while adding more features.
The OBS Live Cloud, jointly developed by Alibaba Cloud and OBS, has become the main way to distribute live signals for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, and two-thirds of the scheduled remote services have been delivered through cloud computing. Alibaba Cloud's global public cloud infrastructure will support the transmission of live footage from Paris to the rest of the world.
To meet the strong demand for digital content from global media, all media produced by OBS during the Paris Olympics will also be uploaded to the OBS Content+ platform for the first time and will be available in Ultra High Definition (UHD) format. Powered by Alibaba Cloud, the OBS Content+ platform will produce 11,000 hours of content for 1,500 media users during the Paris Olympics. In addition, based on Alibaba Cloud's public cloud services, OBS also provides an end-to-end Internet live streaming solution for rights-holding broadcasters.
Without cloud computing, the live broadcast of the Olympics mainly relies on satellites and traditional fiber optic cables to transmit the signal. These facilities are expensive and require hardware to be deployed long in advance. The broadcaster could not change its plan on the spot, and when its own athletes were upset and broke into the finals, they could only miss the live broadcast. However, based on Alibaba Cloud's global infrastructure, broadcasters can quickly start live broadcasts at a lower cost, without worrying about hardware deployment.
At the Tokyo Olympics, cloud computing supported the broadcast of the Olympics for the first time. That year, a rights-holding broadcaster arrived late and wanted to distribute live feeds for most of the event. If it was the traditional way, the broadcaster would not have been able to complete the task, but on Alibaba Cloud, they quickly pulled up the global transmission, and the live broadcast of the entire event was very stable. Since then, more and more Olympic live broadcasts have migrated to the cloud. In 2022, more than 22 rights-holding broadcasters at the Beijing Winter Olympics adopted cloud computing to distribute live signals. This year, the Paris Olympics will be broadcast live by 54 broadcasters using cloud computing, with a total of 379 live video streams and 100 live audio streams, and a total of more than 11,000 hours of content are expected to be produced, an increase of 15% over the Tokyo Olympics and the most extensive coverage in the history of the Olympic Games.
Wider range of cloud broadcasting further reduces economic costs and promotes the development of broadcast production in a more efficient, intelligent, and environmentally friendly direction.
A number of AI applications were launched at the Paris Olympics
In April this year, the IOC released the Olympic AI Agenda, which proposes a framework for the IOC to lead the development of artificial intelligence programs in the global sports sector, joining the global trend of using AI technology.
This year's Paris Olympics adopts Alibaba Cloud's AI-enhanced new broadcast technology multi-shot playback system to realize the "bullet time" special effect of watching the game is like watching a movie, which can make the broadcast screen realize the slow-motion freeze-frame picture of science fiction movies, allowing the audience to see the athletes from multiple angles to enhance the effects of slow motion and time still. Previously, the technology had already been tested on site at the Paris Olympic Qualifying Tournament in Shanghai to ensure smooth operation during the official competition.
In 2022, in the curling and speed skating competitions of the Beijing Winter Olympics, this technology has already begun to be applied. In the Paris Olympics, which will open in July this year, the system will have more AI functions and be deployed in more competition scenarios. It is understood that this technology will be deployed in 14 venues of the Paris Olympics and used in the broadcast of events such as rugby sevens, badminton, track and field, basketball, beach volleyball, table tennis, wrestling, tennis, judo, break dancing, BMX freestyle and skateboarding.
Alibaba Cloud also restored historical footage of the 1924 Paris Olympics for the International Olympic Committee, such as increasing the resolution of historical video from SD to HD or UHD, and repairing the color of black-and-white photos, so that the audience can feel the fierce scenes of the event up close.
Based on a complex deep learning model and trained on a large amount of data, Alibaba Cloud meticulously analyzes each frame of the black-and-white video, interprets complex details, and combines the professional opinions of historians to accurately color them. At the same time, AI models can understand color, light, and context, making them more accurate when coloring images. After repeated learning, these models can achieve a high degree of accuracy and realism in the coloring process.
Alibaba Cloud and the IOC have jointly built a cloud-based AI platform that aims to improve the efficiency of the IOC's management of massive media content through AI-powered media asset management services that provide enhanced visual search capabilities, automatic classification of multimedia content, and video highlight production.
Event management and operation on the cloud
In order to meet the demand for green events, the IOC will use Alibaba Cloud's sustainable product solution "Energy Pal" to intelligently manage and analyze the energy consumption data of the Olympic events during the Paris Olympics, which is also the first time that the energy consumption data of the Olympic Games will be migrated to the cloud. Energy Pro will help the IOC consolidate energy consumption data from 35 competitions. With this solution, the IOC will be able to integrate all relevant data from the Olympic and Paralympic Games, such as electricity consumption, power demand contingencies, venue capacity, competition-related information and on-site weather conditions, into one dashboard that is easy to understand and use.
It is understood that since 2022, Alibaba Cloud has launched a sustainable product solution based on cloud computing and AI, "Energy Saving", which can monitor the electricity consumption of enterprises in real time and calculate carbon emissions online. At the same time, based on Alibaba Cloud's data + AI capabilities, Energy Consumption helps enterprises optimize HVAC energy consumption through self-learning energy-saving control algorithms, and the average energy saving rate brought by the algorithm reaches 12%.