Paris 2024: How ARD and ZDF connected the dots to bring the Olympics and next the Paralympics to German viewers

While the Olympics is now over, the Paralympics is set to begin on 28 August and German regional broadcaster, NDR, is ready. Working as part of the German broadcast conglomerate ARD alongside public service television broadcaster, ZDF, NDR’s Felix Ruhberg, technical director for the Games, has completed the ARD Olympic production and is about to pack his bags to return to Paris for the Paralympics.

ARD and ZDF share the rights for both the Olympics and Paralympics, taking it in turns broadcasting the Games day by day, while sharing the production, technical facilities and staff equally.

The only thing not shared completely is editorial, says Ruhberg. He explains: “The whole team works together; everyone works one day for ARD who broadcasts everything, and the next day we work for ZDF and broadcast everything. But the editorial teams are separated, so not totally, as they share some personnel for online streams and stuff like that. But generally speaking, we share all the production facilities and do two different programmes day by day.”

The ARD and ZDF studio is near the OBS broadcaster studios at Trocadero, at Place de l’Alma. The reason an independent location for the studio was found was so the German broadcasters could utilise it throughout both the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Explains Ruhberg: “The Trocadero studio would’ve been a problem for us. We cannot use it for the Paralympics because as far as we know, they removed them. We wanted to have a studio which we can use for both events, so we rented another space nearby.”

National teamwork

On how everything come together for the Olympics and Paralympics with ARD made up of different regional German broadcasters including NDR on one side, and ZDF on the other, Ruhberg comments: “Right now I sit in an office where the project team for all sports events – so all bigger sports events, like athletics, the World Championships, European Championships, the Olympics etc – are planned. We have a team which consists of editors, technicians, and project managers.

“Together as a team we planned the Olympics for about three years. We work together with ZDF of course; we have to work together with them very closely. We have weekly meetings with them and we plan it together, but we are also our own companies.”

On the workflow, while again everything is shared, a natural split has occurred where ZDF, given its location closer to the Mainz-based National Broadcast Centre (NBC) in Germany, has tended to do more of the remote work at home, while ARD has taken more responsibility for the venues and teams in Paris.

Comments Ruhberg: “We had a bit more to do with the studio, the athletics team, we had a small crew at swimming, so all the unilateral activities that we have [in Paris], but even there, the teams working there are totally shared. It’s really a team working together from ARD and ZDF on these projects.”

Remote production

Ruhberg adds on the workflow: “Most of it is produced remotely. So our programme control room (PCR) is in Germany. The whole post production is in Germany. All our editing is in Germany. We have sub-PCRs, smaller control rooms there in Germany. We have small venues in Paris that we connect remotely, but that’s it. The studio, for example, is fully remote. It’s just a box with cameras and they’re being controlled from Germany.

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“The directors are in Germany, most of the editorial team is in Germany,” he continues. “We have a bunch of technicians on site, some production personnel of course, but most of the team is in Germany. We had a small remote venue at swimming and we had a bigger operations at the athletics, which we didn’t do remotely but used our own OB truck on site.

“Because of the concept that we didn’t have a third sub control room in Germany, it was easier for us to say, “there’s the truck already on site, let’s use it and do our own athletics programme in Paris as a whole”, but that’s it. Everything else was remote, even at the IBC. The IBC was basically an office for us; we didn’t do much, production-wise. We had a few off-tubes there for commentators who could not be on site on particular days, because we didn’t get the commentary positions booked during games time, or we got one position but needed a second one for streaming, for example.”

Altogether ARD and ZDF used a combined 25 LiveU units across around 20 ENG teams out and about in Paris. Says Ruhberg: “We also had many ENG crews with LiveU units and they were everywhere; we sent them to mixed zones and to do interviews in the city.”

The ENG crews were also able to get to sports where the broadcasters did not have positions, says Ruhberg. “What we do is we go to places where we don’t have booked unilateral positions. The marathon for example, we sent a crew there and then we say, “hey, we’re here at the track, you can see the sports behind me,” and we do interviews.”

Connecting the dots

The time zone was perfect for the German market, notes Ruhberg. “That was quite handy for us. Much easier than Tokyo. Everything went quite smoothly and we didn’t really have huge problems. What was difficult is that the whole operation, because of the remote production, means we want to be able to connect every control room or editing suite with every reporter, with every LiveU, and with every sports feed. So back in the day you had one sub control room that did swimming, and you had one editing suite for another sports that was important to you, maybe horse riding you did all the editing and stuff.

“Now you want every workspace to be able to connect with every off tube and every venue commentary position and every feed and every LiveU, so there’s a lot of switching and also planning involved. It’s a lot of dots to connect so that everything works.”

On transmission, Ruhberg adds: “All the LiveU workflows have become important for us. The return feeds to the commentators when they were not at our off tubes, but at the venues, we did with SRT; we had our own encoding farm and did the return feeds with our own SRT streams so that they’re fast and reliable. The network to connect all venues was classic fibre on Nimbra fibre technology with, I think, we had 30 gigs between Paris and Germany, and then another 10 gigs to the studio, another one gig to the athletics, another one gig to swimming, that kind of stuff.”

Paralympic prep

For the Paralympics, ARD and ZDF are using a scaled back plan compared to the Olympics, but this is in line with host broadcaster for the Games, Olympic Broadcasting Services’ (OBS’) production of the event.

Says Ruhberg: “We do scale back as well. We scale back unilateral facilities at athletics, for example, we won’t have unilateral activities at swimming. And we scale back a few off tubes and editing suites.

“But that’s about it. We keep the general production concept as well as our presence in Paris with our studio at Place de l’Alma. The team is much smaller because there’s not so much programming. For example, we have four live streams instead of 10 that we had during the Olympic Games. But I think the amount of feeds that OBS is offering is also scaled back, so [out production] rather fits into what the signals we receive from OBS,” Ruhberg concludes.

The Paralympic Games Opening Ceremony will be live on TV on Wednesday 28 August