In the early morning of July 27, the Paris Olympic Games officially opened, and Alibaba Cloud fully supported the Paris Olympics to achieve a historic breakthrough: cloud computing surpassed satellite for the first time to become the mainstream broadcast method of the Olympic Games, and more than two-thirds of the signals were distributed to the world based on Alibaba Cloud. According to the International Olympic Committee, this is another major technological advance since satellite television began broadcasting the Tokyo Olympics in 1964.
IOC President Thomas Bach praised Alibaba Cloud's cutting-edge technology as helping broadcasters around the world deliver the magic of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, and the widely used Ali AI technology is taking the broadcast of the Paris Olympics to new heights.
The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics attracted huge global attention, but it was only the beginning. The Paris Olympics will produce 11,000 hours of ultra-high-definition content, more than 15 percent more than the Tokyo Olympics, but the size of the Olympic broadcast center has shrunk by nearly 23 percent. Sotiris Salamouris, CTO of the Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS), said that this is largely due to the massive adoption of Alibaba Cloud for the Paris Olympics.
He believes that Alibaba Cloud's infrastructure has achieved global coverage, and the global coverage capacity is comparable to or even higher than that of satellite broadcasting. But the cost of the cloud is much lower than that of satellite broadcasting. Global broadcasters will be able to access the full range of Olympic broadcasts more easily. The Paris Olympics with Alibaba Cloud's blessing will definitely take on a new look compared with the Tokyo Olympics three years ago.
In 2018, the International Olympic Committee began to cooperate with Alibaba Cloud, and then began to broadcast on the cloud at the Tokyo Olympics, and further deepened at the Beijing Winter Olympics.
For example, he said, at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago, there was a broadcaster who arrived very late, almost at the end of the day, but the demands were very demanding. They want to get all the live content and broadcast it to their home country in UHD format. This is not possible for satellite transmission. So we tried the cloud for the first time. Everything went very smoothly and the results far exceeded our expectations and were a big surprise for us.
With cloud computing, Olympic broadcasts have begun to adopt AI technology extensively. According to the Olympic Broadcasting Service, the Paris Olympics will use a multi-camera replay system, just like the "freeze-frame" technology in the "Matrix" movie. It took a Hollywood studio a few days to develop those few seconds of footage. However, on Alibaba Cloud, these images can be synthesized and produced in just a few seconds and directly applied to the live broadcast signal.