WBD Sports Europe undertakes major production infrastructure update with Grass Valley

More than five years in the making, Warner Bros Discovery Sports Europe used the Paris 2024 Olympic Games to debut a brand-new technical infrastructure, following partial deployments at Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022. The aim was to centralise and unite the organisations’ different entities under a single infrastructure that could meet production needs everywhere WBD operates while also increasing operational and financial efficiencies. Not only was the Paris Games a huge success for the broadcaster, but the new setup is continuing to offer benefits, thanks to the levels of flexibility and scalability it provides.

Emmanuel Jacky, senior director of MAM engineering, post-production, and playout for Warner Bros. Discovery Europe, explains the background to the project.

“After the Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang in 2018 under Discovery, we decided to look at how to improve our platform and workflow not only for future Olympics but also for our business as usual (BAU) operations,” he says. “The infrastructure was a bit old and as the business was growing, we decided to rebuild Eurosport from scratch.

“The goal was to deploy a first part for Tokyo 2020 (2021) followed by Beijing 2022, but to be fully operational for the Olympics in Paris in 2024. At this time it was probably the biggest broadcast project started, with lots of innovation, including cloud infrastructure, full software, full SMPTE 2110. We were the first to work with 2110 while the normalisation wasn’t finished.

“It was also personally a double challenge for me as the target of Paris, where I live, made it even more exciting.”

WBD started working on the design with a large engineering group who came up with two options, as Jacky explains. “We had two designs, one with the best vendors for each product and one with a main vendor capable of handling most of the technologies and making sure there was perfect integration between tools. In any project, we know how sometimes it can be difficult to drive vendors to go in the same direction, but when such an innovative project starts, having several vendors accept the innovation challenges could be risky for some of them.”

For this reason, WBD opted to work closely with Grass Valley alongside other key vendors.

“They helped us to put in place what Eurosport needed for this expansion and development and we helped them to develop their tools based on our broadcast and technological experience,” he explains.

Grass Valley kit includes Playout X and Framelight X for media asset management, both powered by the AMPP media processing platform. The company also handles storage, playout and instant replay.

While the system is now part of WBD’s BAU, it was in Paris that the new setup truly proved its worth.

“When the Olympics started we had around 450 new users joining the platform, in one week they all arrived on the platform needing to be trained and to understand quickly how to use it. The challenge was training and support but also engineering preparation,” he says.

The preparation and training that had gone into the upgrade meant these challenges were met. WBD worked with Grass Valley and the other manufacturers to make sure the user interface was as simple as possible, meaning non-technical and less experienced team members could utilise it with ease. There had also been extensive load testing carried out before the Games.

“With more than 2,000 users registered around the globe, you can imagine how the creativity of all of them can be without limits! So we worked on all the scenarios and analysis of editorial teams to make sure that any actions, any load, wouldn’t impact the global platform.”

This inbuilt flexibility and scalability also meant that WBD could call on its postproduction team, based in Atlanta, during the Paris Games.

“We trained them remotely a few days before and they used our content and edited it for our European linear and digital platforms,” he continues. “We wanted to have their expertise and experience in preparing highlights for sports which are gold in the US like the basketball. On the engineering side to be able to put in place this operational request, it didn’t cost anything. All the Eurosport offices around Europe were able to work in the same way and share content from one platform.”

Paris 2024 also marked the launch of WBD’s new MAX offering. “Our digital channels from AMPP Playout X and all the video coming from the MAM Framelight X were the source of this various content,” he continues.

In total, 110 digital channels were shared between the different countries in 20 languages along with 46 linear channels. The MAM and edits exported 62,000 files to digital and other platforms in two weeks.

“Thanks to this platform we were able to provide hours of content for all sports, all medals to our viewers and thanks to all our preparation we didn’t have any major issues, the support was never overloaded. We saw a real improvement since the first version deployed for Tokyo in 2021,” he says.

“At the end of the Games, we sent a survey to the MAM users and they were happy across the world. They also had some fresh ideas that we are currently working on with the target of the next Olympics in Milano Cortina in 2026.”

Adding flexibility to playout was also a key goal of the project, and this too has been achieved.

“In the past we had several islands to manage this number of channels, and they were not really able to communicate with each other. Eurosport managed its channel from an international perspective. Sometimes everyone broadcast the same content but in a different language, sometimes everyone had to manage their own programme because of different rights and different commercial breaks or promos. We have not reduced the number of operators, but they are able to manage more channels now. We can see the expansion of the linear and digital channels on our sports platform,” Jacky adds.

“Our operators can now manage all their European playlists from the Production Control Room and manage all their own commercial breaks with more flexibility. We also answered the question of disaster recovery. We moved from one secret site in the middle of the forest to multiple capability in Europe, while Paris and London stay as our main operational centre.”

He concludes: “The project pushed us to be creative and train on new technologies which make our job so fascinating. It pushed us to adapt, to grow, to reorganise the teams. Many new jobs came with it. New technologies always bring new opportunities. I’m always happy to see we made the right choices. We are proud of what we achieved with the different teams. More than ever, we can say it was a team effort.”