Paris 2024: Reflections on a record-breaking Summer Games

Crowds watching the Olympic flame suspended below a balloon in central Paris

SVG Europe editorial director George Bevir reflects on Paris 2024 and the ability of the Games to draw audiences across linear and online platforms, and the innovation and mammoth production effort involved in covering 17 days of action.

“The penny has dropped,” Warner Bros. Discovery SVP content and production Scott Young said to me on the rooftop of WBD House in Paris a few days before the Closing Ceremony.

Young was talking about how audiences across Europe have watched coverage of the Paris 2024 Games, and in particular the uptake of the broadcaster’s online platforms. “We’re on a roll now, and our audience is starting to understand sport on streaming,” he said.

It’s a sentiment echoed by other Paris 2024 broadcasters. While Paris 2024 saw 125 Olympic records broken in 10 disciplines, Olympic broadcasters and sublicensees have been hailing their own record-breaking performances across linear, streaming and social media.

The Games started strongly for the host country’s national broadcaster, with the opening ceremony of Paris 2024 – broadcast live and exclusively in France on France Télévisions’ channels – the most watched TV programme in French TV history, with more than 24.4 million viewers and an audience share of 83%.

France Televisions during the Paris 2024 Games

And after just 10 days of Olympic action, the france.tv platform had amassed 138 million video views – more than double the views for all events during the Tokyo Olympic Games.

For Warner Bros. Discovery, the broadcaster said it achieved record Olympics streaming and TV audiences, with its Max service – recently launched in 25 European markets – helping to boost viewership and engagement across Europe.

In terms of total viewership, cumulative reach of more than 215 million in Europe viewing Olympics content on Warner Bros. Discovery’s platforms was 23% more than Tokyo 2020. And Warner Bros. Discovery’s average linear television audiences for Paris 2024 was double Tokyo 2020.

Meanwhile, the BBC’s coverage of Paris 2024 was streamed 218 million times online – also more than doubling the Tokyo Games total of 104m.

And for US rights holder NBC, more than 30 million Americans watched each day and with 20+ billion streaming minutes, Paris 2024 was hailed by NBC as the most streamed event in US history.

Having great stories to tell is, of course, vital – and there were a plethora of standout moments during the Games, from home hero Leon Marchand scooping four swimming gold medals to the return of Simone Biles who won three golds and silver to become the most decorated American gymnast in the history of the Olympic Games.

Mammoth production effort

But at the heart of those record breaking viewing figures and streaming success is the enormous production effort to capture and share all of those sporting moments.

SVG was fortunate enough to be in Paris during the Games to speak with host broadcaster Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS) and find out from some of the rights holders how they went about the mammoth task of creating and distributing coverage of the games with their viewers.

What was clear from our trips to the IBC and visits to studios and presentation facilities and sporting venues around Paris, was the scale of the effort and commitment, and the ongoing commitment to innovation.

That was clear from the very start, with the use of France’s first private 5G network to capture the highly ambitious parade along a 6km stretch of the Seine. While advances in contribution technology might not have been so apparent to viewers at home, enhanced statistics and graphics and technology such as the cloud-based multi-camera replay system were obvious to viewers and genuinely helped to explain key moments of action, including one of the closest men’s 100m races of all time.

Meanwhile, OBS Live Cloud become the main method of remote distribution to MRHs for the first time in the history of the Olympic Games, taking over from satellite.

And, At Paris 2024, the compound at Champ-de-Mars Arena relied not on trucks or flypacks but on a cabin full of COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) servers that replace dedicated hardware.

The project has a clear goal: to accelerate the move to virtualised hardware systems and open up a world where, instead of deploying trucks, remote-production-service providers can send flypacks based on general computers.

OBS CTO Sotiris Salamouris explained to SVG’s Ken Kerschbaumer in Paris: “When you need 70 galleries like we do, it is a problem to find enough trucks.”

All of this is part of looking to the future to ensure breadth of coverage continues to grow and improve. And that focus on scale was also the driving force behind the use of AI in Paris, assisting OBS in delivering an unprecedented 11,000+ hours of content and used to aid automatic highlights generation – with over over 95,000 highlights created with the aid of AI.

OBS director of broadcast engineering Guillermo Navarro explained to me in Paris that the motivation is to create more content rather than reduce the workforce. “There are so many opportunities for new content that go untapped because we don’t have more resources,” he said.

The Paris 2024 Closing Ceremony was an opportunity for a final celebration and for the curtain to be drawn on Paris 2024, but also to pass on the baton to LA28 where more records on the track and on TV and online will surely be broken.

But before then, the Olympics will move to Milano-Cortina in a couple of years. The Winter Olympics will present different set of challenges for broadcasters, with the Games the first Olympics to be officially spread across multiple cities, posing logistical challenges – including how to handle presentation and deploy pundits.

But before that even, the Paralympics will take place in Paris in just over two week’s time. While it draws a smaller share of viewership than the Olympics, it provides plenty of opportunity for innovation – especially in digital and multiplatform offerings.

In the UK, host broadcaster Channel 4 says the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games is set to be its biggest ever broadcast with over 1,300 hours of live sport airing for free across its linear, streaming and YouTube channels.

It’s a sentiment echoed by US rights holder NBC, which says it will provide the most live Peacock streaming hours ever for a Paralympic event, with approximately 1,500 hours of live coverage across all 22 Paralympic sports set to be presented throughout the duration of the 12-day event

So it looks like the record-breaking summer of sport isn’t quite over yet.