Paris 2024: Inside WBD’s Olympics broadcast operation
Studio 1 at WBD House with a view of the Eiffel Tower
Matt McDonald, group SVP EMEA Broadcast Services for Warner Bros. Discovery, explains how the broadcaster delivered thousands of hours of Paris 2024 content to linear channels and online platforms across Europe.
Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) enjoyed a stellar Summer Olympic Games, reporting record viewership and engagement across its many platforms and channels.
Shortly after the closing ceremony on Sunday 11 August, WBD said it had achieved a cumulative reach of more than 215 million in Europe viewing Olympics content on WBD’s platforms (23% more than Tokyo 2020), including Max and discovery+, as well as its Eurosport TV channels and free-to-air networks in Norway (TVNorge), Sweden (Kanal 5) and Finland (Kutonen, TV5).
In total, WBD aired more than 3,800 hours of live content, providing outputs to 47 rights territories, with 59 linear channels – including 46 Eurosport channels across Europe in 19 languages – and a digital offering (Max, HBO Max or discovery+, depending on territory) provided viewers with every moment – peaking at 54 parallel events on the busiest day. Plus, specifically for Paris 2024, seven HD pop-up channels and one UHD pop-up channel made available to 34 affiliates and partners across Europe.
Capturing, managing and delivering all that content was a mammoth task, and leading the department responsible for broadcast operations and technology across Europe was Matt McDonald, group SVP EMEA Broadcast Services for Warner Bros. Discovery (pictured above).
“Our operations teams executed brilliantly to enable our editorial teams to tell the stories of the Games”
Speaking with SVG Europe at the WBD House studio facility at Hotel Raphael during the Games, McDonald says there were two main elements to preparing for Paris 2024: the on-site prep (including the build of WBD House and the other on-site production facilities such as the mixed zones, venues, and the NOC houses), plus the scaling up of WBD’s European sports platform.
He says: “We have an enormous 2110 capability based upon two tech hubs, one in London and another in Hilversum in the Netherlands. They support our two main operational hubs, in London (Chiswick) and Paris (Issy-les-Moulineaux) that provide core capabilities for all EMEA. These hubs also provide studios and galleries, plus we also have 10 other production hubs across Europe (Munich, Milan, Stockholm, Oslo, Lisbon, Madrid, Hilversum, Warsaw, Copenhagen and Stockley Park) and for Paris 2024, we also had engineering support and some post-production out of Atlanta in the US.
“The main thing for us is that the two main operational hubs run everything – bookings, MCR, ingest, media management, playout – so those are the centres of the operation and Paris has made all the difference for us during the Olympics,” he says.
With previous Games taking place in China, Japan, South Korea and Brazil, Paris 2024 was a ‘home fixture’ for WBD, which has its EMEA HQ in Issy-les-Moulineaux, in the south of the city. The fact it was a local Games not only provided a boost to viewing figures thanks to the favourable European time zone, but because WBD already had such an established site and ready-made production facility in Paris it also provided the opportunity to reduce its presence at the International Broadcasting Centre (IBC).
WBD’s base at the IBC on the other side of the city consisted of a “small footprint” manned by 28 staff across two shifts to provide the on-pass of host broadcaster Olympic Broadcasting Services’ (OBS) feeds of the Games.
Stand up positions: Eurosport presenters prepare to go live
The Paris location also provided a chance for WBD to showcase the city’s landmarks, with WBD House overlooking the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe. With four studios used by production teams from the UK, Sweden, France, Poland, Italy and Germany as well as three stand-up positions used by WBD’s global news network CNN, and live broadcasts for Spain, Finland and Denmark, plus a bar area with three RF cameras and a Technocrane, the studio was a sizable facility. This was in addition to Eurosport France operating a separate studio at Club France in the Parc de la Villette.
And it was the build of the rooftop studio that provided McDonald and his team with arguably their biggest challenge, he says. “It’s a working restaurant on top of a prestigious hotel, so we had a very, very limited period to take everything off the roof and then get everything up here that we needed, and then assemble it. The build was four days, so that was a challenge of planning and organisation that involved a lot of pre-build, and then there was a plan that literally went in 15-minute blocks over four days to make sure everything happened seamlessly.”
From its position on the 7th floor of the Hotel Raphael, WBD House was treated as an extension of WBD’s core network with each of the 11 territories producing content in WBD House able to remote produce from their homebase galleries, for example for Germany via Munich, and Poland via Warsaw.
“We’re fully 2110 for this Olympics for the first time and I think what we’re seeing now is a much more mature, reliable, robust state, so that it works in an end-to-end fashion. It’s a lot more hardened, a lot more secure, a lot more robust.”
Camera racking and vision control for WBD House was managed remotely from Stockley Park, while audio line-up and control was managed remotely from Chiswick Park. AR graphics were remotely managed from Stockley Park – apart from the Swedish team which remotely managed a spin-off of WBD’s Cube studio technology from their home-base setup in Stockholm, with live tracking data being relayed to London and to Stockholm. Lighting for WBD House was a hybrid operation with the majority of controlled out of Stockley Park.
The workflow of all feeds being made available in all production locations, and the ability to control any production or studio from any location meant that less space at WBD House was taken up by kit, and the footprint could instead be dedicated to production and editorial. It also supported the aim of making the operation an extension of WBD’s business as usual (BAU) operation; everything is based upon the idea that all of the lines can get back to WBD’s WAN and ingested in two parallel hubs.
The art of broadcast engineering: Racks of kit in a room in Hotel Raphael
A temporary Olympic BOC (broadcast operations centre) was set up to co-ordinate the IBC and WBD’s two BAU MCR teams in its operational hubs in Issy-les-Moulineaux and Chiswick, with the BOC in London managing the return vision to studios and locations around Paris.
The MCR operation was split between London and Paris, receiving approximately 400 HD sources and 27 UHD sources from the IBC, WBD House, NOC Houses, venues, and 43 Mobile Viewpoint backpacks around Paris.
In addition, the MAM and post-production operation was similarly sizeable, with over 70,000 hours of content ingested, and the MAM operating with more than 650 daily concurrent users throughout the Games and over 100 concurrent users daily in post.
The whole production was delivered on WBD’s ‘Sport Tech Platform’, which enabled everything to be remote produced over 2110. Says McDonald: “What we’re seeing now is maturity of 2110; in previous Olympics, there were a lot of challenges, and we were working in a hybrid model of SDI and 2110.
“We’re fully 2110 for this Olympics for the first time, in terms of everything from production all the way through to playout. It’s all IP, and there’s no SDI handoff. And I think what we’re seeing now is a much more mature, reliable, robust state, so that it works in an end-to-end fashion. It’s a lot more hardened, a lot more secure, a lot more robust.”
Watch WBD’s Scott Young reflects on ‘spectacular success’ of the Paris Games
Orchestration and control were provided by Sony Nevion Video iPath and BNCS, with Arista switches (1200 switches on a media network spread across Europe) and overall, the 2110 network had approximately 300,000 NMOS endpoints.
“We believe – probably like everyone else! – that we’ve got the biggest 2110 network in the world,” says McDonald. “To do the scale that we operate in terms of production and distribution of up to 19 languages (WBD produced over 15,000 commentary sessions over the course of the games), it wouldn’t be possible to do it any other way,” he says.
Core MAM and playout was provided by Grass Valley AMPP FramelightX and AMPP PlayoutX. In keeping with the ‘BAU’ theme, McDonald explains that very little new infrastructure was added for the Olympics.
“The aim was to use all our homebase facilities and build as few temporary facilities as possible. We did add 10 temporary VOBs in Paris within the office space. We used our estate of over 60 hardware-based PCRs/MFRs across Europe, but we did add one additional software-based PCR in Hilversum for our Netherlands market, with Vizrt Vectar (TriCaster Vectar), Grass Valley AMPP, Simply Live (RiMotion) and Waves audio mixer (Waves Cloud MX Audio Mixer).”
The BAU workflow for contribution, playout and distribution managed the UHD feeds, with WBD’s UHD channel able to use multilingual commentaries originated for WBD’s HD channels whilst still being able to switch between multiple different sports.
While little in the way of new infrastructure was added, there was of course a need for additional resource to support WBD’s coverage of the Games with around 3,100 staff in operations and engineering across Europe and the US working on the Olympics.
“We did a lot of work with all of the operational teams to provide training and get best practice nailed down,” says McDonald. “We onboarded a lot of freelancers, so it was really, really important that we had good training and onboarding so they could join us in a seamless way.
“That’s been a historic challenge, and our training teams who have also been working with our US colleagues have set up the appropriate training and it’s made such a big difference…we had a very smooth Olympics delivery and this was only possible due to the preparation and execution of our teams and our partners.”
McDonald says it was a huge team effort. “Our software and broadcast engineering teams delivered a very stable platform and our operations teams executed brilliantly to enable our editorial teams to tell the stories of the Games,” he says.