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Case Study: BBC Technology, bringing the Olympics back home – October 2004

Source: EMPICS

Major sporting events are increasingly competitive - not just for athletes, but also for the broadcasters tasked with providing up-to-the-minute, multimedia coverage from locations that are often distant and dispersed. As audience expectations for multi-format, real-time coverage rise along with the cost of sports rights acquisition, the 2004 Athens Olympics was a crucial showcase for the BBC’s capabilities and reputation as the UK’s leading broadcaster. BBC Technology drew on its heritage of providing the technical foundations for some of the world’s largest sporting events, including Euro 2004, the Sydney Olympics and the Commonwealth Games, and played a crucial role in delivering BBC Sport’s Olympic experience to the UK audience by TV, radio and the internet. Craig Dwyer, chief marketing officer at BBC Technology reveals how it was done.

A home from home – the broadcast facility in Athens

The heart of BBC Sport’s Olympics operation was a 1,000 square meter studio and production facility designed and built by BBC Technology and BBC Resources in the Athens International Broadcast Centre. This technical facility was crucial, acting as a production base for the BBC’s live, interactive and regional services, as a studio for live commentary and reporting, and a communications node providing fibre and satellite connections for the distribution of broadcast content and IT and communications networks to the UK.
The scale of the production task faced by those working at the Athens facility was immense. The facility had to manage the production of TV content, including the complete coverage for BBC One and Two, from a huge amount of material generated by 80 content feeds provided by the Olympic host broadcaster, as well as the BBC’s own on-site coverage, which including commentary from 25 different venues.
The implementation of the facility was a feat in itself. Whilst BBC Technology planned its layout and technical design in 2003, local build schedules meant that installation began in Athens only weeks before the Games, using much equipment that was fresh from the Euro 2004 soccer tournament. In this short period of time, BBC Technology implemented facilities that included two production control rooms, two sound control rooms, six non-linear edit suites, 15 VTR record banks, and graphics and office areas; all of which had to be shoehorned into a constrained space made all the more awkward by a forest of earthquake-proof steel columns.
The jewel in the crown at the broadcast facility was the BBC’s main broadcast studio backdrop, located in an upper floor plant room at the International Broadcast Centre. It was an unusual choice of location to say the least – and one that required exacting acoustic design by BBC Technology to ensure that no unwanted noise interrupted the BBC’s coverage! It however allowed the BBC to broadcast live commentary with a stunning real world backdrop of Athens and the Olympic stadium; most broadcasters had to reply on simulated backdrops and video walls.

Putting in the plumbing

Source: EMPICS

Producing comprehensive, live coverage of the Olympics was one element of the Olympic challenge – but getting this huge volume of content back to the UK was quite another. BBC Technology's Media Communications team supplied BBC Sport with fast, high capacity links that tied the production in Athens directly into the core network at BBC Television Centre in London.
An optical fibre network link providing a massive 155Mbs of bandwidth between Athens and London was used to distribute the bulk of BBC Sport’s coverage of the Olympics. This network provided high bit rates for video content, as well as delivering the BBC’s interactive TV services. To ensure absolute reliability, this network was backed up by a full time satellite link from the International Broadcast Centre to the BBC’s Television Centre.
The fibre network also extended the BBC’s IT and telephone network to support the hundreds of BBC staff on site in Athens, with a telephone switchboard that fully integrated both remote and BBC phone systems. IT connections using this same fibre link also enabled production staff and journalists working in Athens to connect directly to standard BBC desktop production and newsroom systems back at TV Centre. Staff simply had to plug in, log on, and could work in exactly the same way that they were used to back in the UK – and efficient way of working that meant that little time was wasted learning new technologies and systems.

The online Olympics

BBC Technology's Internet Solutions team - the team behind bbc.co.uk, Europe’s most visited content streaming site, with 1.7bin page requests a month – was also heavily involved in delivering BBC Sport’s Olympics coverage. Having already set a precedent for online streaming of major news and sport events, including Wimbledon and Euro 2004, BBC Technology expanded the capacity of its internet delivery infrastructure to handle a huge surge in demand for online coverage of the Games, with the BBC offering six live online channels as well as highlights clips after events.
A dedicated internet platform was set up to offer significantly greater delivery capabilities for live and on-demand broadband streaming, with the site capable of delivering up to 50,000 concurrent 256Kbps broadband streams for the Olympics alone in both Windows Media 9 and RealMedia 9 formats. Managed by BBC Technology's Internet Solutions team, the platform was integrated with BBC Technology's Digital Rights Management platform for secure content delivery. Each and every end-user was also located by their computer’s IP address to ensure that the BBC’s broadband content distribution rights for the UK market only were not breached, and content not delivered to users outside of this market.
Given the huge demand for Olympic coverage online – driven in large part by rapid growth in consumer broadband uptake - BBC Technology commissioned 30 new content servers for the BBC and also had to make large-scale network changes, including extra connectivity to the UK’s Internet Service Providers in order to deliver levels of content streaming and downloads that were up to four times those delivered internationally by the BBC on a day-to-day basis.

Conclusion

The technical capabilities provided by BBC Technology, in conjunction with BBC Resources, around the Olympics were crucial to BBC Sport’s coverage of the year’s largest media and sporting event. Over 350 hours of coverage were produced in total, and delivered across a diverse set of media, to produce a viewing experience of unparalleled richness and depth.
As consumer demand for fast-moving, compelling and comprehensive coverage increases, and the media through which it is consumed extends to include the internet, interactive TV and other media, broadcasters need to plan beyond using traditional broadcast equipment and techniques to use state of the art digital infrastructure, networks and technologies to produce their coverage.
Only by working with experienced providers like BBC Technology can they maximise their assets and investments in sports rights to produce a truly modern, seamless, cross-platform experience.

BBC Technology was acquired by Siemens Business Services on 1 October 2004. The company will be renamed Siemens Business Services Media Holdings.

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