We’re one month to go to Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games – set to be the most spectacular yet!
Delegates at SportAccord’s MediaAccord ‘Paris through the media lens’ session – with our brilliant guest speakers – will soon see the fascinating insights come into play at the most technologically complex and visually stunning Games in history.
Here are some of those highlights from Yiannis Exarchos, Chief Executive Officer of Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) and Executive Director of the Olympic Channel with Pierre Galy, Head of Sports at Agence France-Presse, an International Olympic Committee (IOC) officially recognised news agency on the IOC Press Commission.
Paris 2024 – extra special Games
Paris 2024 will be record-breaking in many ways, including the way these Games are written about, photographed, videod, broadcast and distributed around the world – for everyone, of all generations.
“We would be remiss if we didn’t recognise that these Games will take place in a very special place for Olympic history and the world – in Paris, one of the most photogenic places on earth, a place of re-birth of the Olympic Games, the vision of Pierre de Coubertin,” underlined Exarchos.
“But also a place, which has managed to capture the imagination of the world with a description of what the modern Olympic Games can be about – I think this is the single most important thing that our host Paris 2024 has achieved.
“To re-design what the Olympic product looks like, by bringing sports – and especially younger style sports – into the heart of the city, by bringing the Opening Ceremony right into the heart of the city.”
Galy explained the enormity and complexity of the Games from a global media perspective:
“Let’s start with the Opening Ceremony – the first one outside a stadium, six kilometres along the Seine.”
For journalists, photographers, videographers and broadcasters this will be both a huge opportunity and a big challenge, involving navigating security while accessing the action and public attending – all vital for capturing this ‘ceremony of several firsts’.
Young & digital
Exarchos explained the Paris 2024 Olympic Games will stage around 3,400 hours of competition, with the volume of content created by the International Olympic Committee being triple this figure:
“This is primarily driven by the need to feed the digital beast – to feed the need for different content, different types, different platforms, different narrative styles.”
With social networks playing an increasingly pivotal role in how news is consumed, global media now have to provide a comprehensive and tailored response to growing trends – Galy highlighted:
“We have dedicated products and news with our AFP Social Stories and mobile formats for social media.”
‘Re-imagining’
The massive opportunity that Paris 2024 presents for ‘re-imagining’ communication in the wake of such huge changes in media consumption was raised by Exarchos.
With the convergence of technology and continual streams of information, and the seamless merging of our digital and physical worlds speeding up to create a situation where ‘everything is media’, he explained:
“We have the ambition that half the earth’s population will experience the Games. But the world is not at all uniform. So how do we go about re-imagining how we cover the Games?
“Providing the right content to the right audience on the right platforms has been the driving thinking of our coverage. We will produce more than 11,000 hours of content. We believe that broadcasters will publish something close to half a million hours across all different platforms.”
Cinematic Games
Exarchos underscored the ambition of Olympic Broadcasting Services to capture and portray these special Games: “Paris is the birthplace of cinema in France – we are paying tribute to that: our coverage will be more cinematic than any of our other Olympic coverage in the past.”
Olympic Broadcasting Services will use over 1,000 cameras with more than 3,500 microphones of 29 different types and feature over double the multi-camera replays seen at Tokyo 2020 – for viewers to better understand sports that are not usually so prominently showcased outside of the Games.
On-board Point of View 5G cameras, UHD HDR and immersive 5.4.1 sound and 8K coverage in collaboration with NHK will also be used, alongside AI for enhanced graphics, commentary, interview transcription and generating automated highlights – particularly useful for the vast content being produced for social media.
Virtual Studio Backdrops and Augmented Reality interview opportunities in the Athletes’ Village will allow broadcasters ‘back home’ to produce authentic Games-time content, giving viewers a fully immersive Games-time experience.
And the Games experience will not stop when the athletes return home – Galy explained:
“We will be offering ‘back to the scene’ content thanks to our networks across the world, ready to capture all the celebrations once the athletes are back to their home country.”
#GenderEqual
Paris 2024 will be the first #GenderEqual Games in terms of participation, with the International Olympic Committee focusing closely on advancing gender equality beyond the field of play.
With gender equality a subject so close to Exarchos’ heart, this was a compelling subject to conclude SportAccord’s captivating MediaAccord session.
“A major issue our industry has is the disparity – both in terms of coverage we see on screen, but also in terms of the industry, between men and women,” explained Exarchos, with some exciting statistics:
– two thirds of OBS Broadcast Venue Management positions will be occupied by women, compared to the 50/50 split at Tokyo 2020; and
– plans to hire 50% more female commentators than in Tokyo.
Exarchos closed out by spotlighting the Paris 2024 Olympic Broadcasting Services legacy – the Broadcast Training Programme for undergraduates and graduates of local universities: “We have already trained more than 1,400 young students, who will be working with OBS in paid positions – they will be starting their careers working on the largest production in the world.
“I’m happy to say that 57% of them are women – so the young broadcast generation in France is going to be predominantly female, and that can only be a good thing!”
Hit the share button on the SportAccord 2024 ‘Paris through the media lens’ video – get the inside track on what to expect from Paris 2024, as we count down with just one month to go!
