Speed of sound: How Eurosport’s centralised model broke its own Olympic record for audio

Eurosport supported all its clients during the Olympics with coverage which would have been impossible using traditional workflows, delivering an ear-watering 11,800 commentary sessions and more than 24,000 hours of commentary across just 19 days

Producing 11,800 commentary sessions and more than 24,000 hours of commentary, Eurosport’s Olympic coverage broke records. SVG Europe spoke to Eurosport’s director of audio technology, Anthony Sachot, to find out how it got to the finish line.

“If the video is produced in the cloud, I will move my mix into the cloud with the video. If the video is mixed on prem, I will stay on prem. Because nobody will ever say that the video is not in sync with the audio; it’s always the other way around,” says Sachot.

“In Paris we ensured that every single moment of the Games was available live and on replay in every language, while on the linear channels we also needed to provide a broad selection of events for individual markets to select”

Sachot was very clear about the relationship between video and audio at SVG Europe Audio’s Sports Audio Summit last year, and as a broadcaster covering as many audio output mixes as Eurosport, the distinction matters.

Eurosport’s pan-European model is unique. It generates so many language outputs that every video channel has up to 20 associated audio commentary tracks, which are defined by country or delivered as options depending on who, where, and when it is being consumed.

New workflows

At this month’s Olympic Games in Paris, those numbers were multiplied to an historic level. As part of Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD), Eurosport catered to 47 markets in 19 languages, and across 40 regional variations. It covered all 329 medal events across 35 venues, supporting both main Eurosport channels (Eurosport 1 and Eurosport 2), eight pop up channels dedicated to specific sports categories, linear free-to-air channels in the Nordic markets, and multi-language commentary to both Max and Discovery+.

The coordination of it all is challenging even on a slow day, and synchronising each individual commentary position to video is always a challenge. Meanwhile, managing the right workflows, personnel, and hardware to achieve it all is an unenviable task.

It is unsurprising that Sachot needed help. Foreshadowed by his statement at last year’s Audio Summit, that help came from centralising and automating all of Eurosport’s commentary tracks with the international mixes in a centralised, private cloud environment. It took six months to build the workflow for Paris, but its technical development is less of a sprint and more of a marathon, with initial trials going back to the Tokyo Games in 2021.

Crucially, it enabled Eurosport to support all its clients with coverage which would have been impossible using traditional workflows, delivering an ear-watering 11,800 commentary sessions and more than 24,000 hours of commentary across just 19 days.

“In Paris we ensured that every single moment of the Games was available live and on replay in every language, while on the linear channels we also needed to provide a broad selection of events for individual markets to select,” says Sachot, who in addition to his work with Eurosport heads up all live production audio engineering and support at WBD Sports.

“All our main markets have regional variations, and so every one of our pan-European markets has access to every language. For the popup channels, language availability depends on whatever local commercial deals are in place, and continuously delivered events on WBD platforms (Max and Discovery+) are always delivered with every available language.”

It was clear that doing this in a traditional way was not economically scalable, and Sachot worked with Netherlands-based audio production software specialist, Lama, to automate each commentary feed and associate them with the right international mixes directly from the IBC in Paris.

Eurosport’s director of audio technology, Anthony Sachot

Keeping it central

Eurosport hosted all its Lama AutoMix instances in its two data centres, located in London and in Hilversum in the Netherlands, and provided remote access to every AutoMix engine to every one of its regional markets via a web-based UI. The AutoMix engines take in clean commentary feeds from each commentator and mixes them with the associated pre-mixed international sound feed. It handles audio processing like EQ, compression, noise reduction and output limiting to create a final broadcast-ready mix which is available for use on both digital and linear broadcast outputs.

Physical mixing is only required when the local linear mixers switch between different AutoMix feeds, from event to event or from sport to sport.

Eurosport also made use of Lama’s AutoSync functionality to automatically synchronise the mix output when upscaling to any UHD video feeds, adjusting the delay of the audio in real time to maintain sync.

“The Lama AutoMix platform is complementary to our other production and linear commentary platforms,” explains Sachot. “OBS ensured that both English and onsite commentaries were made available from the IBC in Le Bourget, with all international sound feeds pre-mixed onsite on Lawo consoles.

“All the other WBD commentaries were available directly in the data centres. We had a contribution platform which sent the unprocessed, pure commentary feeds to the data centres where they were picked up by Lama’s AutoMix instances running on that particular machine. Although all the incoming feeds were mixed in the data centres, each of our individual regional markets could access any of those mixes. The software ensured that everything was automatically levelled, and every output adhered to industry Loudness standards such as ITU BS.1770-3. Playout was also controlled remotely from Paris and London.”

Everything everywhere

It is a workflow that Eurosport has been developing for a number of years and has been employed on a smaller scale on all Eurosport events, such as Roland Garros, Wimbledon, the US Open, the Australian Open and Le Tour de France. And although it’s been used at previous Olympics, it’s never been stretched to these levels.

“We first used it a year before the Beijing Olympics, but Beijing was the first big event fully produced with the platform,” says Sachot, whose relationship with Lama founder, Jeroen Dieks, stretches back to 2008 when Dieks was a Eurosport Netherlands operator.

“When he first contacted me about an auto mix solution, I was interested because he knew the requirements of Eurosport’s commentary productions. It was around the same time Discovery started to push digital products and needed more and more commentary production, and I knew our hardware platform was not sized for those quantities.

“We collaborated on what kind of mix we needed and how we would integrate it into our 2110 infrastructure, and really developed the workflow in time for Beijing. Since then, Eurosport has used it every day, and on every program, to provide around 800 commentary sessions a week.”

Refining these workflows has enabled Eurosport to add in redundancies as well as scale, and each automixer is treated like a remote workflow. Although half of the platform is located in the broadcasters’ London data centre, and half in Hilversum, every AutoMix device is accessible from any of the 18 mix positions across Europe.

“We added physical capacity to provide N+1 redundancy spread across both data centres, which means that clients attached to one of the data centres can switch to the other if we lose one of them, with half of the capacity on each side to support the other,” adds Sachot.

But scale is not the only positive takeaway, as the process solves a few other challenges that have always been associated with distributed production workflows at this scale.

Presenters at one of the stand up positions at WBD House for Eurosport prepare to go live on Olympic coverage in Paris

Latency and sync

“Prior to introducing this workflow, we would build a production with international sound and English, and we would push that physically by IP to all our international markets, and those markets would take their commentary mixes and send them to pair with international sound,” says Sachot.

“Depending on the market, the delays and latencies of the programme could be inconsistent, and we would have to constantly recalculate all the delays to keep everybody aligned. Sometimes latencies can shift when connectivity moves from a normal path to a backup path, and while international sound has to remain associated to the picture, international commentaries do not.”

Eurosport’s centralised model means international sound never leaves the data centre, and because the broadcaster’s 120 physical commentary units are all connected to this same network and mixed centrally, everything stays coordinated. In addition, LAMA’s AutoSync functionality dynamically synchronises the HD program audio to support WBD’s UHD upmixes, calculating and applying the appropriate delay in real time.

It promotes a consistent quality of output across the regions, with minimal training required to create each programme mix and localised support to manage around 60 linear mixers, 30 production mixers, and 350 automixers. The tools and the workflows are exactly the same across Eurosport’s entire market.

Getting the job done

“It works really well for these kind of remote productions,” says Sachot. “Using the AutoMix simplifies the process so that the local operators can concentrate on their commentary positions, building the mix-minus IFBs, ensuring communications are reliable and looking after their talent. If the mix is already covered, they can concentrate on making sure their connectivity is watertight. Automating the mixing process helped simplify the operators’ workload and enabled them to focus more on the IFB management and other routine operations.”

The sheer volume of Eurosport’s Olympic output took a leap of faith, but one which ultimately gave them a podium place, and all by sticking to Sachot’s guiding principles. Because keeping the audio coordinated with the video, wherever that is, pays dividends however that audio is mixed.