Whereas nothing compares to the sheer thrill of watching the Video games dwell, streaming providers can present a higher-quality viewing expertise.
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The lately concluded Olympic Video games in Paris hosted round 10,500 athletes from 206 Nationwide Olympic Committees (NOCs), with over half of the world’s inhabitants tuning in to look at the motion because it unfolded. To host a sporting occasion of this scale is notoriously costly for the host nations, to the tune of US$28 billion for Tokyo 2020 (exceeding the preliminary price range by almost 80 %).
A big portion of income collected from the Video games comes from ticket gross sales, promoting and sponsorships, which all depend upon the occasion’s capability to draw eyeballs. That is changing into more and more difficult as a result of shift from conventional tv broadcasting to on-line streaming, the rise of social media and heightened demand for high-quality, instantaneous and personalised content material, amongst different components.
How can the Olympic Video games overcome these hurdles and meet the necessities of varied stakeholders? What function do digital applied sciences play in enabling its operations? We chart the actions of Chinese language expertise conglomerate Alibaba – one of many 15 Worldwide Olympic Companions of Paris 2024, Tokyo 2020 and the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang in 2018 and Beijing in 2022 – to share key classes on digitalisation.
1. Digital can and ought to be 99.999 % dependable
Many people have skilled that second of exasperation when your video freezes throughout an essential Zoom name or your cellphone runs out of battery simply as you’re about to name a cab. These small but inconvenient failures result in a typical frustration that digital applied sciences can disappoint us once we want them probably the most.
That is unacceptable for the Olympic Video games. As we witnessed in the course of the males’s 100-metre race, American runner Noah Lyles gained the gold medal by a 0.005-second margin. Omega’s expertise have to be extraordinarily correct and dependable to seize these outcomes. The Worldwide Olympic Committee (IOC) set a virtually inconceivable objective: Important expertise providers, together with cloud providers, ought to function efficiently 99.999 % of the time.
How can a expertise supplier ship on this near-perfect promise? The reply is redundancies. Alibaba established a lot of redundancy measures to make sure the reliability and resilience of its providers. First, it constructed enough back-up methods round its applied sciences, starting from {hardware} to software program. The corporate additionally deployed load balancers to distribute site visitors to a number of back-end servers, cross-available zones and areas to assist these multi-level redundancies.
Subsequent, the Alibaba crew optimised its processes particularly for the Olympics to maximise resilience. To completely guarantee the steadiness of the Olympic cloud platform, it was locked down one month earlier than the Opening Ceremony until the top of the Closing Ceremony. This helped keep away from any modifications that would result in an surprising impression on expertise providers. Alibaba additionally simulated totally different situations through end-to-end rehearsals, together with three inner ones and two technical ones with the Paris 2024 Organising Committee (POC) and expertise companions like Atos and Samsung.
Equally essential, Alibaba dedicated key sources – devoted “core groups”– to make sure ultra-high-quality deliveries. To allow early detection, the Alibaba Cloud on-site groups labored carefully with the IOC and the POC, monitoring related infrastructures and the cloud platform 24/7 in the course of the Video games. Abnormalities have been detected inside seconds and robotically assigned to one in all 4 severity ranges, which triggered the required responses. This ensured that the related groups have been rapidly activated to fulfil the strict reliability necessities of the Video games.
Along with the on-site assist groups, related knowledgeable groups have been deployed to work carefully with the IOC and every organising committee. The duties began earlier than the Video games with migrating native methods to the cloud, supporting employees and volunteer coaching on the utilization of varied applied sciences together with AI and constructing customised improvements.
Though back-end actions are sometimes hidden from the general public eye, these efforts helped guarantee a virtually flawless 99.999 % supply.
2. Digital can supply instantaneous and high-quality content material
Whereas nothing compares to the sheer thrill of watching the Video games dwell, streaming providers can present a higher-quality viewing expertise. Stay streaming can supply on the spot replays from a number of angles, digital illustrations, wealthy information evaluation and a virtually 360-degree digital rendition of vital performs. All this made Paris 2024 the primary Video games wherein web live-streaming quantity surpassed another distribution means together with tv broadcast, based on Yiannis Exarchos, the CEO of Olympic Broadcasting Companies (OBS).
How did digital applied sciences improve the viewing expertise and make it extra participating? Historically, along with OBS, every broadcaster or media-rights holder (MRH) sends its personal crew to file particular footage. This expensive follow generates a lot waste, as proprietary movies and pictures captured should not often shared with different broadcasters. The sheer variety of recordings can take days and even weeks to sift by and may be troublesome to suit into social media codecs.
Cloud applied sciences assist tremendously on this regard. Ranging from Tokyo 2020, Alibaba labored with OBS and MRHs to implement a brand new follow. OBS invested in high-speed, high-resolution cameras to doc the motion, and recordings have been centralised within the Alibaba Cloud. This lowered the necessity for every broadcaster to ship a big crew to the Video games, releasing up their crew to deal with pre- and post-game protection, behind-the-scenes options and unique interviews.
Paris 2024 marked an acceleration of this strategy. OBS created a vault of all occasion recordings from a number of angles, and gave every MRH full entry. As soon as the content material was centralised on the cloud, Alibaba added a layer of AI, together with GenAI (generative AI), to assist broadcasters choose, edit and produce numerous content material.
AI can present high-resolution renditions of serious moments. Take into account the lads’s 100-metre closing, the place American athletes Noah Lyles and Fred Kerley, and Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson appeared to cross the end line at almost the very same time – not less than based on the bare eye. Nearly instantaneously, the AI answer processed the photographs and movies captured by a number of cameras to create a 360-degree rendition of this second. Digital expertise introduced a transparent verdict – Noah Lyles was a nostril forward by 0.005 seconds. The freeze-frame, slow-motion replay served up high-quality and extremely participating content material to on-line viewers.
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Moreover, AI can be utilized to edit a number of digicam recordings nearly instantaneously. Due to facial recognition and object-tracking algorithms, the AI editor can speedily choose the best recordings that includes particular athletes or highlighting sure performs. Exarchos praised the expertise for pushing “the way in which we convey the tales of athletes [and] sports activities”.
GenAI additionally considerably enhances real-time information evaluation and graphic illustration. A key characteristic that units the streaming expertise other than on-site viewing is the richness of data, starting from historic and dwell information to complementary graphics. On the current Video games, digital graphics displayed throughout swimming occasions highlighted the relative distance of every athlete to the main swimmer in actual time, in addition to the trajectory of the ball after every play in tennis or desk tennis.
The brand new era of viewers are digital natives used to consuming content material that’s brief, instantaneous and personalised. To deal with this demand, the Alibaba crew constructed an AI answer that distils probably the most memorable moments from full-length footage into brief video highlights inside minutes.
The system makes use of superior machine-learning algorithms to detect, classify and tag key occasions inside video recordsdata – be it objectives, fouls or standout performs – throughout totally different sports activities. Every influencer or broadcaster can present the specified storyline, and the device will custom-generate a number of variations of the highlights in required codecs. This will increase the effectivity and effectiveness, in addition to reduces the prices of customised distributions throughout totally different social media platforms.
This large spectrum of high-quality and real-time content material turned a staple of Paris 2024. IOC president Thomas Bach acknowledged that the digital applied sciences used on the Video games contributed to the record-high viewers engagement.
3. Digital could make content material extra relatable throughout cultures
Along with the 2 official languages – English and French on the current Video games in Paris – the Olympic Constitution requires the usage of 4 further languages: Spanish, Russian, German and Arabic. The Olympic Channel, additionally out there in Chinese language, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Japanese and Portuguese, was broadcast to about half of the world’s inhabitants.
GenAI performs a vital function in content material sorting and fast looking out. Alibaba’s AI algorithm helped broadcasters – particularly commentators – choose, edit and distribute customised content material for every nation based mostly on reputation and social media traits. Take the ladies’s singles badminton closing between He Bingjiao of China and An Se-young of South Korea. In China, the match was broadcast by CCTV with tailor-made replay for He. In the meantime, in South Korea, it was aired on KBS with tailor-made replay for An. Sooner or later, GenAI may even translate voice commentary and textual content content material into a number of languages.
By way of customised content material based mostly on a single supply, digital instruments not solely create a shared expertise throughout cultures, but in addition allow moments of unity.
4. Digital can cut back complexity and uncertainty
With all these digital enhancements, certainly prices would rise, no? In actual fact, these applied sciences have helped cut back prices. Take into account the extremely polarising Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony. Regardless of its many controversies, the occasion was indisputably distinctive. It broke the boundary of a single venue by integrating digital content material with dwell performances, reimagining the Parade of Nations alongside the River Seine and having a number of levels throughout Paris. The necessity to synchronise the whole lot and guarantee a seamless viewers expertise introduced important logistical challenges.
All of the digital advantages defined to date have been at play. The cloud enabled organisers to successfully handle sources and logistics whereas offering instantaneous analytics and suggestions. AI supported real-time enhancing, offering high-quality content material that was concurrently transcribed and translated into a number of languages for native broadcasting. GenAI created the scenes wherein the Minions stole the “Mona Lisa” and enriched the content material with further info and graphics to reinforce visible impression. What’s extra, chosen video segments and nonetheless photos have been tagged and channelled by social media to suit the wants of various audiences.
The most effective half? This extremely participating content material was supplied at a decrease value and yielded a decrease carbon footprint. The prevalence of digital, cloud and AI applied sciences considerably lowered the necessity for human sources. OBS produced over 11,000 hours of content material at Paris 2024, a 15 % enhance from Tokyo 2020. OBS’ on-line content material supply platform (Content material+), which is supported by Alibaba, was the first technique of delivering short-form and social media content material to MRHs. The latter had entry to greater than 17,000 items of content material, of which roughly 790 items have been vertical content material designed for social media.
But, the Worldwide Broadcast Centre’s bodily area at Paris 2024 was 13 % smaller than Tokyo 2020, and electrical energy consumption at Paris 2024 was 44 % decrease than Tokyo 2020. Moreover, the world used for broadcasting at sporting venues was lowered by 11 % and energy consumption was lowered by 29 % as in comparison with Tokyo 2020.
As digital transformation continues to permeate each enterprise and society, many leaders and enterprise executives proceed to wrestle with the query of whether or not and the way digital can carry worth. Paris 2024 offers a transparent reply. Digital can enhance each effectiveness and effectivity. It could enhance engagement by offering high-quality, participating and customised content material, cut back prices and guarantee stability and reliability.
If a high-stakes occasion just like the Olympics can profit from digital instruments, high-performing companies can apply these classes to their digital transformation and drive worth by these applied sciences.
Chengyi Lin is an Affiliate Professor of Technique at INSEAD. His analysis primarily focuses on digital transformation and innovation for world and multi-national organisations.
Chris Tung is President, Strategic Growth at Alibaba Group.
[This article is republished courtesy of INSEAD Knowledge, the portal to the latest business insights and views of The Business School of the World. Copyright INSEAD 2024]
