10 TVBEurope London 2012 News & Analysis


At various London 2012 events,Dick Hobbslearned about the central part played by Olympic Broadcasting Services, primary tenant of the IBC


LORD COE, chair of the London Olympic Games organising committee, regularly pointed out that his task was the equivalent of staging 26 simultaneous world championships. That, in turn, leads to truly global interest: in 2012 there were 205 rights- holding broadcasters. At the centre of the television


and radio operation was Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), the primary tenant of the International Broadcast Centre (IBC, for August at least). It was OBS that commissioned the 52 outside broadcast units at 43 venues that provided the core coverage of every minute of every event. Some of the world’s biggest


broadcasters also took production space in the IBC. BBC, NBC, CTV and Nine-Foxtel were among those taking the OBS multi-lateral feeds, adding their own cameras and creating their own unique take on the games. As home broadcaster, BBC took the decision to cover every event live, which meant as many as 24 parallel HD channels at times. Smaller broadcasters were content to take the packaged output prepared by OBS, which delivered up to 10 channels at busy times, complete with commentary linked from one of the major broadcasters if necessary. Alongside those 10 were a rolling news channel compiled by a large team of journalists and producers on site, and, for 230 hours of ceremony and competition, a 3D channel.


Access all areas All rights-holding broadcasters had access to all the content, and could request clips to use in their own coverage at any time


Inside the Main Stadium at Olympic Park, Stratford, which played host to track & field events


www.tvbeurope.com September 2012


OBS commissioned 52 outside broadcast units at 43 venues


Going for metadata gold


then request the full material to be transferred. With some priority management for very time- sensitive material, this allowed the flow of content from the central storage area to be regulated. Despite this, the sheer volume of material still means that the network needed to be able to support 1.5Tb a second. To manage the metadata,


All eyes on transmission: OBS provided the core


coverage of every minute of every event


from immediately after it happened. OBS imposed a limit to optimise data traffic, but this was generous: a 10 minute maximum per clip, and no more than 100 clips a day. Managing all this material


was the real challenge, and if the server network inevitably becomes the heart of a file-based infrastructure, in this case it was very definitely the metadata that was the lifeblood. EVS provided the servers to


OBS. The ingest server alone had a capacity of 1,000 hours, with 48 input channels and 24 outputs. Because many events run for hours, the server has to be able both to accommodate very large files and to act on those files as they are building, not wait until the event is over and the ingest is complete.


During ingest the server


moved content to the EVS SAN, which provided a master store of 5,600 hours of content. It was from this that requests from broadcasters were delivered. Content was also


simultaneously transcoded, as the file was building, to an Avid Isis server to support OBS’ own editors and the Olympic News Channel, and to three layers of proxy resolution storage. The three layer model allowed the huge numbers of connected computers to use Microsoft Smooth Streaming for adaptive bitrate connectivity. Even when the network was under huge pressure, any connected producer could make timecode-accurate decisions when requesting content. The procedure was to use a browser to select in and out points of required clips,


EVS developed an interface to the Olympic Data Feed (ODF), a master database available to everyone from bloggers to race officials. It was continually updated with competitions, times, competitors, the weather and more. This was automatically polled by the EVS metadata structure. To add the content data,


there was a room in the IBC containing 50 logging stations at which operators used a touchscreen to mark points of interest. These touchscreens were automatically loaded with relevant parameters, including competitor names, from the ODF, so these logging stations maintained productivity by ensuring the right information was loaded instantly.


In the Mix At each venue was one or a number of positions known as Mix Zones. These are points where individual broadcasters could grab immediate interviews with contestants, and were a simple way of broadcasters creating a tailored output by having exclusive content of their national heroes.


Each Mix Zone came back to the IBC as a continuous feed. To clip these up for individual broadcasters, EVS developed an iPad app. A production assistant at the venue entered metadata and pressed in and out buttons at the start of each interview. That was linked via Wi-Fi to the


main database, so producers could immediately identify their clips and interviewees. The secret of the success lay not just in creating very rich content metadata but in distributing it. As well as loading the asset management system, the data was also parsed and transferred to the Avid Interplay on the Isis. That meant editors could search for content efficiently, making best use of their time. Another contractor, Deltatre,


created what was known as the Broadcast Data Feed. This pulled in content metadata from the asset management (and, where appropriate, from the ODF, for instance for instant timings and placings) to populate each broadcaster’s template graphics as well as prompt commentators. The BDF was tied to source timecode, so when broadcasters requested a clip the data appeared alongside the video and audio. When producers were creating packages for later transmission they could use the same template graphics systems, confident that the correct, and most accurate, data was available to populate them at the moment of conforming the story. The result of this workflow


was that, while the individual national production offices were as busy as you would expect to create hundreds of hours of live and near-live television, the central OBS facilities were strangely calm. Just a handful of staff were required to monitor audio and video quality, route commentaries to individual broadcasters and radio stations, and direct the outputs. The result was generally acclaimed coverage of a remarkable couple of weeks of sporting action, and a powerful — and fully catalogued — addition to the Olympic television archives.


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