In the early hours of Saturday morning, the Paris Olympics finally kicked off, and people finally saw some signs of a word-of-mouth reversal.
The original preparations for the Paris Olympics have been shrouded in clouds and full of fun.
The security plan was stolen.
The training of the Argentina Olympic training team, watches and rings were completely stolen.
The air conditioner was not turned on, and the athletes were so hot that they couldn't stand it and stripped in protest.
After an opening ceremony full of imagination and artistic cells, the expectations of the Paris Olympics are finally back on track.
It not only proves that Paris, the capital of art, but also pulls the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games from the underworld back to the yang.
And, if you have the heart to observe, you may find that it is strange, how is it that there are China China everywhere, or TMD China!
The mascot "Friger", which is loved by children all over the world, is 80% produced in Yiwu, China.
With Yiwu as the fulcrum, Made in China is its main supplier of table tennis, keychains, cheering scarves, cheerleading flags, cheering sticks, table tennis tables, running tracks, etc. in the Olympic Games.
According to the statistics of Zhejiang Yiwu Customs, in the first half of the year, the export of sporting goods to France increased by 150.7%.
It is definitely a good thing for us to make money from foreigners, but this has also caused many netizens to reflect: Is China's technology only Yiwu technology? Not this time.
On July 19, the sixth torchbearer in Paris, Wang Jian, a Chinese, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and founder of Alibaba Cloud, appeared on the streets of Paris.
Academician Wang Jian didn't come by himself, but with him, there is also China's cloud computing leader, Alibaba Cloud.
As recently as July 26, the Olympic Games posted a Weibo post.
This is another major technological advance since the 1964 Tokyo Olympics began to be broadcast on satellite television.
Among them, Alibaba Cloud was named, saying that Alibaba Cloud has made cloud computing the main broadcast method of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, and IOC President Bach said that more than half of the broadcasters are using Alibaba Cloud technology.
According to the Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, this is the first major breakthrough in broadcasting technology since the 1964 Tokyo Olympics were broadcast on satellite television.
In the early hours of July 27, the official opening of the Paris Olympics was streamed to the screens of a global follower. More than two-thirds of the signals are distributed globally by Alibaba Cloud.
So what's changing?
First of all, for the common people who watch the Olympics. It's the way you watch, it's freer. For example, I remember the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when I was in the summer, I liked to watch basketball games, but one problem was that when you wanted to leave the living room to get an ice cream or go to the bathroom, you might miss the shots.
Moreover, even if you watch the replay, there is a problem, that is, the wonderful replay is artificially edited, and it is not clear what you want.
Since I'm a point guard, I love to see the point guard's passing details, but at least at the time I could see a few great assists.
And the biggest change at this Olympics is the multi-camera replays, such as BMX races, where you can "wrap around" the athlete and watch him fly through the obstacles. It is possible to achieve a high degree of freedom in the live broadcast signal to produce a high-degree playback image that can only be generated in the past ten hours.
Moreover, according to Science and Technology Daily, the bandwidth of cloud broadcasting is an order of magnitude higher than that of satellites. Scaling from Mbps/s to Gbps/s, and even to terabytes, is equivalent to transferring 500 HD movies in one second.
Such a high level of recording accuracy, coupled with bullet time, allows you to see more details that you couldn't see in the last broadcast era, just like Keanu Reeves in "The Matrix".
In the past, this kind of complex lens must have required a lot of post-production work, but with the blessing of the cloud platform, these cool shots have become "commonplace".
And the realization of bullet time is behind this group of Alibaba Cloud engineers.
The Paris Olympics will produce 11,000 hours of ultra-high-definition content, and you can experience the ultimate experience in 4K or even 8K, an increase of more than 15 to 20 percent over the Tokyo Olympics, and maybe a 40 percent increase in actual production in the end.
What's even more awesome is that because of the large-scale task package to Alibaba Cloud, the area of the Olympic broadcast center has been reduced by nearly 23% compared with the Rio Olympics.
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.
Moreover, Alibaba Cloud has also brought AI technology to the Olympic Games, and with their help, the historical images of the 1924 Paris Olympics have been restored from black and white to color, and the resolution of historical videos has been increased from SD to HD or UHD.
It can be said that Alibaba Cloud not only makes the experience of this cloud broadcast era more realistic, but also makes the blurred images of the old era reproduce in high definition.
Not only that, Alibaba's Tongyi large model has defeated many competitors in the field of AI and become the technology provider of the first AI large model application in the Olympic Games.
Some people may ask, Alibaba Cloud is so deeply involved in providing comprehensive support for the Olympic Games, and Alibaba is the top partner of the Olympic Games, right? Is it possible to throw it out if you have money?
It would be a mistake to think so.
The Olympics can be said to be a common celebration of mankind, or it can be a large-scale business gathering.
Every pixel you can see with the naked eye could be an ad slot, or a combination of a bunch of sponsors.
But where you can't see with the naked eye, business, technology, branding, and PR are all undercurrents surging in it.
The income from the broadcasting business is the richest.
According to official data from the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Rio 2016 Games alone generated $4.1 billion in broadcast revenue, accounting for 74% of the IOC's total revenue.
Since the broadcast business is the job of the Olympic Committee, the technical support of the broadcast naturally cannot smash people's jobs, and must be carefully selected.
It's not like an advertisement, you can buy a display space by throwing tens of millions of dollars, whether it's a full meal or a full meal, the Olympic Committee thinks very well.
Without diamonds, who would dare to let you do this porcelain work? Alibaba Cloud has come a long way behind it, and it has taken up to 8 years of hard work, or even longer.
In 2008, at the Beijing Olympic Games, the song "Beijing Welcomes You" was sung all over the world.
But in the field of technology, it is full of dependence on foreign countries.
For Alibaba, which was in the ascendant of the e-commerce field at that time, it was also plagued by this situation, and with the expansion of its business scale, the cost of using these foreign equipment and systems was too expensive and too expensive to bear.
The price of a minicomputer is hundreds of thousands to millions of yuan, and the cost of commercial database software is even more unexpected, directly reaching tens of millions.
So, Ma Yun poached Wang Jian and handed him this difficult task.
In 2009, Alibaba Cloud came into being, a cloud computing system exclusive to China, which was originally named "Feitian" by the team, and Wang Jian also became the "chief architect".
In 2010, two years after Alibaba Cloud developed, many large companies also developed their own cloud computing technology.
We have a conventional competitive goal called "5K", that is, you have to schedule 5,000 servers at the same time, as long as you have this awesome technical ability, you can dominate the entire cloud computing industry.
Just like AI, ChatGPT has basically eaten up most of the AI industry after it has reached the emergence and realized the extremely human-like question and answer method.
But from 2010 to 2012, it was difficult for Alibaba Cloud's team to achieve this goal, and the entire department basically received the lowest score in the team. Because KPI scores affect wages, many employees who can't bear it have resigned and run away. Even within Ali, some people are worried that Wang Jian will not be a liar, right?
Due to the lack of achievements and no progress, the entire department of Alibaba Cloud has received the lowest score in the group for several consecutive years. But Alibaba Cloud is still tackling key problems.
Until the end of June 2013, Alibaba Cloud's 5K sprinted all the way, and finally passed the most difficult stability test, gnawing this hardest bone.
At this point, Alibaba Cloud has opened the second pulse of Rendu, and the subsequent development is to spiral up in the midst of setbacks, and gradually become a well-deserved brother of China's cloud computing.
It was at this time that Alibaba Cloud also set its sights on the Olympic Games, and at this moment, they have obtained the qualification to compete with the world's cloud computing brother Amazon Zhuolu battlefield.
The Olympic Games is naturally a large-scale event for 7.951 billion people around the world, and it will also be a huge traffic peak.
Just as in the Three Kingdoms period, careerists wanted to blackmail the Son of Heaven to order the vassals, and in the Warring States period of Japan, every daimyo had to support the army and go to Luo. In the era of the United States and the Soviet Union competing for hegemony, everyone wanted to go to the moon.
These things seem to be of low interest on the surface, but they are an important proof of their own strength.
In the field of broadcast technology.
In the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, online video has begun to become an important means of broadcasting, but unfortunately, the broadcasting technology is in the hands of foreigners.
For the 2016 Rio Olympics, Korea's Samsung completed Sanglo and cooperated with the National Broadcasting Corporation to bring 8K definition broadcasting and VR live broadcast.
In January 2017, a team of Alibaba Cloud engineers made a low-key trip to the IOC headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland.
At the bidding site, Alibaba Cloud showed off a set of data.
In short, Alibaba Cloud's cloud technology can carry the entire Double 11 traffic peak, like a cyber Three Gorges Dam.
In addition, Alibaba Cloud was able to deploy a broadcast-quality live streaming environment in just 10 minutes on site, which would have taken months to complete with a traditional IT architecture.
In this way, Alibaba Cloud won the trust of the Olympic Committee through its hard power, and also got this ticket, becoming the only cloud service provider for the Olympic Games.
At the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, Alibaba Cloud broadcast it through OBS Cloud, and transmitted the 4K ultra-high-definition signal with lower latency and clearer to every screen of desire and beauty in dozens of ways.
Then, the 2024 Olympic Games, cloud broadcasting has successfully subverted traditional satellite broadcasting. Of course, not only Alibaba Cloud, but also many familiar but unfamiliar companies, such as Yiwu, a group of small commodity companies whose names you can never name, are providing oxygen and soil to this human event in Paris.
Just as human beings are based on heaven and earth, they have the eternal ambition to pursue higher, faster, and stronger.
And this time, it can be, higher image quality parameters, faster transmission speed, more intense and realistic picture relay.
Immerse yourself in it, cheer for the Chinese athletes, and let us cheer for these companies.