IBC 2024 Conference to showcase innovations in sports broadcasting and technology
IBC 2024 will shine a spotlight the latest technological innovations shaping the future of sports broadcasting and live event production during its Conference and as part of a series of free to attend content sessions delivered on the exhibition floor.
With the Paris Olympics recently concluded, the Conference session “Olympics 2024: Technology to Broadcast Beyond Expectations” on Saturday at 3pm will delve into how cutting-edge tools and techniques elevated the viewer experience, with experts from BEIN Media and NBC Sports joining SVG executive director, editorial Ken Kerschbaumer to discuss their approaches to maximising engagement and operational efficiency.
In another Conference session, speakers from ITV, the BBC, Limitless Broadcast and Jackshoot will explore the ongoing shift to IP-based workflows in “The Evolution of Live Production: Where are we on the transformational IP journey?” on Sunday at 12.30pm. As broadcasters move towards more flexible, cloud-integrated infrastructures, the session will provide key insights into how live production is adapting to these transformations, highlighting both opportunities and challenges in the journey to fully scalable IP systems.
Plus, an in-depth look at the impact of AI will take place on Sunday at 10am in Conference Room 1, during the “AI in Action” discussion. This session will feature a range of speaker including Chris Jackson, Global Head of Digital Data and Analytics, Olympic Channel who will deliver a talk on “Gen AI in Paris 2024 Olympics: New analytics to reach new audiences” in which he will explore what took place in Paris, where he says “within the digital operations of the Olympics our challenge is to tell a very high number of global and local stories to audiences at speed. We will run through learnings, trade-offs, and the challenges in delivering practical benefits from current generation AI at speed and massive scale”.
And, on the IBC Innovation Stage (Hall 3, 3.B01) on Saturday at 4.15pm, speakers from Video Progetti will discuss “How Sports Broadcasters Are Transforming Content Production into Fan Experiences” and explore the latest use cases of broadcast production including broadcaster NVP’s Innovation Hub which is a breeding ground for new production techniques including virtual production, cloud infrastructure and ST 2110 workflows.
IBC Accelerators and sport
The IBC Accelerator Media Innovation Programme, for which SVG is media partner for the sport-focused projects, will also be examined during IBC. On Friday at 11:15am on the IBC Innovation Stage (Hall 3, 3.B01), “Connect and Produce Anywhere, Phase II”, will explore how a previous Accelerator project for the build and development of an all IP, edge-first, multi-cloud, multi software test bed environment in the CAPA (Connect and Produce Anywhere) Accelerator 2023 has evolved, with the project team now positioned to implement and road test the solution on some real-world live event production scenarios. Speakers will include representatives from Google Cloud, Channel 4, Techex and the BBC.
Another Accelerator project, “Scalable Ultra-Low Latency Streaming for Premium Sports”, will take to the same stage on the following day (Saturday, 1.30pm) for a deep dive into how this project seeks to achieve Twitter-equivalent latency and near-instant playback start using standard HTTP streaming technical stack and infrastructure. The areas explored will be the use of low-latency encoding and segment-based ingest, the latest low-delay extensions to MPEG DASH, and possible uses of MV-HEVC video codec and the QUIC protocol. BT Media & Broadcast, Comcast, Castlabs and Ateme will all be part of the discussion.
In addition, another Accelerator session – “Evolution of the Control Room – Leveraging XR, Voice, AI & HTML-Based Graphics Solutions” will explore how this project has combined two original Accelerator 2024 proposals into a transformative, overarching project exploring the evolution of live production workflows – with two key streams of development – the Evolution of the Control Room, leveraging XR, Voice, AI and HTML Based Graphic Solutions. It will take place on Friday at 2pm on the Innovation Stage.
Plus, at the Content Everywhere stage in Hall 14, “Live sport and the OTT ‘ecosystem challenge” will provide the setting for a discussion about handling OTT traffic during sporting events, with the CDN Alliance to introduce its initiative to reboot the ‘ecosystem challenge” of a lack of coordination between content providers at one end, operators at the other with content delivery networks (CDNs) in the middle. It will take place on Saturday at 10.45am.
- The full IBC 2024 Conference programme can be found here.