Paris 2024: OBS Doubles Down on 'Athlete Moment' Initiative

Workflow allows Olympians to connect with their family and friends straight after finishing their competition

Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) is making a major expansion to its Athlete Moment initiative for Paris 2024, with the setup to be rolled out to more than double the sports for this summer’s Games in a bid to share more of the emotion of the Games with viewers at home.

Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – Photo: Owen Hammond

Athlete Moment, which allows Olympians to connect with their family and friends straight after finishing their competition, was introduced at the Tokyo 2020 Games in partnership with Kiswe, an interactive streaming company Due to Covid-inspired restrictions, only athletes and officials were allowed into arenas and stadiums for the Games in Japan, which meant no spectators – including athletes’ entourages- to witness and celebrate their achievements.

“As broadcasters, we know very well the importance of a live audience for sporting events, so we thought about how we could create some atmosphere; if you have an event, especially the Olympic Games, and you have empty seats, subconsciously people might think, ‘Why on earth am I watching, nobody’s here!’,” explains OBS chief executive Yiannis Exarchos.

“Those 90 days between March and June 2021, I will not forget easily! But it was really very powerful teamwork between OBS and our team, where we all worked together to get this done, and it was such a phenomenal success.”

“We have all seen so many times when there is a big moment in a sporting contest often the first reaction of any player, any athlete, is to turn to the audience and look in the stands for people who are close to them. And this happens even more so with the Olympics because of the uniqueness of the event taking place every four years. We felt it was a big loss not to have this reaction.”

In contrast to the enforced absence of spectators in Tokyo, organisers expect the Paris 2024 venues to be full, but they still want to see the athletes connect with people that they love, which has prompted ‘Athlete Moment 2.0’, explains Exarchos.

“We did 15 disciplines in Tokyo (with Athlete Moment), and that will go up to 35 in Paris, with the ambition of covering almost 80% of the athletes. There are some sports or some disciplines where it’s impossible to do or makes less sense, such as team sports,” says Exarchos.

Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 – Photo: Owen Hammond

The inspiration for Athlete Moment came shortly before the Tokyo Games took place. OBS was speaking with Kiswe co-founder and chief marketing officer Wim Sweldens and his team about the use of emerging technologies for the wider distribution and aggregation of signals and remote editing for Tokyo 2020. Those conversations were then broadened to include physical athlete stations on the field of play in the venues.

“We trusted the technology, but then we had to resolve a number of questions around logistics and organisation,” says Exarchos. “So we had a commitment from Kiswe that they could deliver the solution across 15 sports, which was a very, very big deal and done in only three months.”

Sweldens says: “Those 90 days between March and June 2021, I will not forget easily! But it was really very powerful teamwork between OBS and our team, where we all worked together to get this done, and it was such a phenomenal success. They’re all super excited about expanding it to Paris. We want to make it super easy for the athletes; they can just sign up via the Olympics portal, they get a unique, private olympics.com link with their name in it that they can then share to five parties. It could be friends, family, it could be their fan club, it could be the local café – they have the control over it.”

While the setup in each venue is relatively straightforward and is comprised of a display monitor to show live video footage of friends and family, along with a remotely operated camera and microphone, the logistics involved are far from straightforward.

Adds Sweldens: “When a family member or friend clicks on the link from any device, they will be connected to a moderator in the Brussels control room wearing an OBS shirt., The moderator will confirm they are who they say they are, and that they are connected to the right athlete. They’ll also check their connectivity and make sure it’s properly framed and lighted so we can create TV-quality images.

“So it’s a very private moment, but there’s also 100 million people watching. And it can be connected to the multilateral or to the unilateral feed or it can be clipped and be used for social media.”

“And once they pass the moderation check, they go into the next step, which is a producer or remote producer who will then have all the family members together. They might arrive up to an hour early because we don’t know exactly when the Athlete Moment will happen, or when the athletic performance is done. But then, they will wait. There is close coordination with OBS and a field producer – someone on the ground or at the field to play – who will wrangle the athlete at the right moment.”

“So, it’s an incredible amount of logistics between the local team and the Brussels control room where our Kiswe team is based to make sure that this 90 seconds can happen. And it is some of the most amazing raw emotional TV moments because the station is on the field of play – it’s not in the mixed zone, and the athletes feel more comfortable, they’re relaxed, and there are no reporters there. So I like to call it the most public-private moment. So it’s a very private moment, but there’s also 100 million people watching. And it can be connected to the multilateral or to the unilateral feed or it can be clipped and be used for social media.”

Adds Exarchos: “The images can be used in the venues, and we have the technical capacity to isolate these images and exchanges so that broadcasters can use them in the narratives that they want to create because this is unique footage. So it’s a far more advanced system compared to what it was in Tokyo, and we’re expecting to produce around 580 hours of Athlete Moment content, all remotely over the cloud out of Kiswe’s Brussels control room.”

Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. Photo: Owen Hammond

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