With the 25th edition of the Winter Olympics – Milano Cortina 2026 – set to take place between 6 and 22 February 2026, France Télévisions is getting ready to shred up a production that will bring all the excitement of the slopes and rinks to viewers in France.
A key part of making this production work – with the pressure of every location for the events being so far apart from each other – is the workflow. France Télévisions is using its extensive background in remote production, as well as extended reality technology, to pull together talent and athletes from all over Italy together into a single main studio at the IBC in Milan.
Making the workflow work
The workflow being used by France TV during the Games is a mixture of onsite and remote, says Pierre Martin, France Télévisions’ Winter Olympics team leader for Milano Cortina and senior production manager (or executve producer). “We are making a split between a remote and an onsite presence. Since Torino 2006 [Winter Olympics], France Television has been working on remote production. In 2006, we had our main control room in Paris and we had a small studio in Paris, and all the sports in Italy. So we have been using this remote production since then, and we are using the same process [for this Winter Olympics].”
Speaking to SVG Europe, Martin continues: “Even though Italy is very near France and Milano is not so far from Paris, we are keeping the process, and we work in UHD in Paris with the main control room,” Martin continues. “We have installed a traffic room in Milano at the IBC due to the fact that OBS is providing all the signals in Milano, and it was impossible to have this connectivity in another location, such as in Cortina or in Livigno.”
The broadcaster will be creating four green screen studios in the Winter Olympics locations of Livigno, Bormio, Anterselva and Predazzo across northern Italy, each of which will use virtual and extended reality to bring athletes and talent to the main studio in Milan.
“We manage a system to select at Milano every day, throughout the day, a selection of the good feeds to carry from Milano to Paris,” says Martin. “We use Paris as the main control room where we do our programme, and the same for the cameras; so the cameras in the [green screen] studios also transmit on these feeds. We do a remote production with the studio [in Milano] and we do also remote production with the four green screen studios in the mountains.”
He continues: “The HQ is in Paris for the main control room and the programme is started from Paris, but all the material, the main studio, is in Milano. So Milano is our pre-base. We do checks with the four studio [in the mountains] from Milano, and only send the best and most efficient feeds to Paris.”
Paralympic workflow planning
While Cortina d’Ampezzo is a key location for several other broadcasters, France TV will be using a lighter touch there during the Winter Olympics with a container and a team for reports from live mixed zones. However, during the Paralympics there will be a complete changeover, says Martin: “Cortina will be the main base in the mountains for the Paralympics. So we change and we add another green screen studio in Cortina for the Paralympic Games from the 6 to 15 March.”
Martin adds that the workflow will remain similar for the Paralympics, albeit slightly scaled back: “We will do the same workflow for the Paralympics. So the important thing for us is the setup is pretty much the same. We will have two green screen studios [instead of four] due to the fact that there is only Cortina and Val di Fiemme [as locations for the Paralympics in the mountains]. So we have two extended reality studios, but the set up in Milano will be the same with the studio. And for the Paralympics, we start broadcasting in France at 8.30am every morning to 6.30pm, followed by the sports programme.”
He concludes: “With technology, with the transmission also, we will be confident when everything is on air and on the way, as they say. We are operating on the same basis as we do for] the Tour de France, where every day is different. Every day we have to change and every day the connectivity is different and every day we have to rethink a new challenge.
“But for us to go to Italy, it’s a big pleasure. It’s a big pleasure [for the Winter Games] to come back to Europe. It’s a big pleasure also to broadcast on the same European time, and not at night, so Italy is fantastic. Everyone that we’ve met has been very, very welcoming and we are confident on our production, and we are very happy,” says Martin.
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