How Do You Deliver Sports Personalization at an Olympic Scale? Yiannis Exarchos Is Warming Up for Paris.

Next month, the host broadcaster for the Paris 2024 Olympics plans to produce 11,000 hours of content, compressing the equivalent of 450 days of content into just 17 days. This includes not only live competition coverage but also behind-the-scenes content, digital offerings, and even augmented reality experiences.

“I don’t think that there is a network in the world that produces that in a year,” says Yiannis Exarchos, CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS).

In conversation with fellow sports production executive and A Guy with a Scarf podcast host Carlo De Marchis, Exarchos explains that the content that OBS has to cover is vastly more complex than that for a soccer World Cup or Super Bowl. (You can listen to the full discussion below.)

“The Olympic Games is still one of the few events that have this unique capacity to aggregate very large and diverse audiences,” he says, pointing out that long-form coverage remains as important as clips published on social media.

“I would say that coverage is probably equal measures geared towards linear television and digital. At the heart of what we do, long-form storytelling remains very, very important.”

“Something else that I think is changing is how much broadcasters are interested in getting closer and closer access to the athletes. This will be noticeable in our coverage in Paris.

“Our coverage will go behind the scenes and close to the athletes from the moment when they arrive in a venue. It’s very, very clear that [viewers] care a lot about that.”

Exarchos has been involved with the Olympics since 1997, when he assisted the Athens bidding committee. He helped set up the host broadcasting operation for the Athens 2004 Games and subsequently the IOC’s own host operation OBS, which it took in-house to better manage the sheer scale and complexity of the job.

OBS’s approach, which has evolved over successive Games, is to allow rights-holding broadcasters to customize their coverage by selecting different content modules.

“We’re doing our coverage in a modular way that allows broadcasters to use different parts and create a product that’s more customized for their own audiences,” he says.

One example is that every Olympic sport is produced with a linear international feed and a parallel feed called “multi-clips.”

“This feed is made up of different clips that we [curate] to give broadcasters the option to pick up cameras that maybe we don’t use, or longer length of some shots, or shots which are fantastic, but for some reason we have not used it in the international feed,” Exarchos explains.

“Because of the nature of the broadcast format we cannot follow all athletes from beginning to the end, but we can give that opportunity to broadcasters if they want.”

The host operation can use the multi-sport nature of the Games to trial tech advancements in one sport before expanding them wider.

On the one hand, OBS uses new technology where it helps with storytelling, and, on the other, to create efficiency savings in cost or reduction of CO2.

“What we’re trying to do is to create space for new things by creating very radical efficiencies,” Exarchos says. “This has been helped by adoption of technologies which may not be directly visible to the end user, but which have ended up allowing us things that the end user can see.”

The gradual adoption of cloud resources (operated by Chinese group Alibaba) is key here. When they started using data centers in Beijing 2018, “some broadcasters were very skeptical” about whether cloud could be used for HD. This year, the source format is 4K UHD and the majority of transmission will be hosted in the cloud.

More visible innovations include 3D replays generated with the help of AI, and more dynamic graphics to help viewers better understand the action.

For the first time OBS will employ AI to generate highlights “very fast, in different formats, whether for traditional television, for social media, vertical feeders, horizontal videos [and] for all sports,” he said.

“The beauty of it is that broadcasters will be able to customize these highlights [how] they want” for example to fit a national profile or for different moods.”

While acknowledging the immense potential of AI, Exarchos emphasizes the need for structured and responsible implementation. He foresees a future where AI tools are trained with more contained and structured datasets to ensure consistency and adherence to ethical standards.

“I’m a believer in the huge capacities of AI. I’m also very aware of the incredible risks that are associated, especially on the ethical front,” he cautions.

The sale of TV rights is essential not just to the future of the Olympic Games every four years but the survival of many Olympic sports, he claims.

Seventy percent of revenues from the Olympics come from media rights, of which the IOC retains less than 10% for its own operation, he adds. The rest is distributed to national Olympic Committees and International Federations.

“The money from the Games’ TV rights fund the continuation of most Olympic sports. I’m not talking about football or basketball — or the few very commercialized and very successful sports — but for the majority of sports, the amounts coming from the games is fundamental for their survival.”

Also important in this regard are the partnerships with Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCU and Netflix, for which OBS has produced Olympic-based docs.

“It’s very important for us because it opens up Olympic storytelling to audiences that many of the streaming platforms reach and demographics that many of the streaming platform reach on a constant basis. Maybe we don’t need that so much but certain Olympic sports need that [attention] in between the Games.”

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