8K video streams and live athlete tracking: AI at the Paris Olympics
Video streams of the Olympic Games in Paris are broadcast in up to 8K resolution as a test. AI also selects highlights and even rates the athletes.
Olympic Broadcasting Services, the company responsible for international coverage of the Olympic Games, expects around four billion television viewers for the Summer Games in Paris.
(Image: Bild: Intel)
No event attracts more viewers than the Summer Olympics. The 2024 Olympics in Paris will reach around half of the world's population: the International Olympic Committee expects between 3.9 and 4.5 billion television viewers.
Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), a company founded by the International Olympic Committee, will broadcast the sporting event live and digitally worldwide. It enhances the video signal with slow motion, still images and 3D views. It also provides real-time information on the discipline, player names, location and time.
To accomplish all these tasks, OBS works with partner companies such as chip manufacturer Intel and software company Alibaba. OBS plans to produce over 11,000 hours of content for Paris 2024, 15 percent more than for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. The videos are available in various resolution levels – some even in 8K.
Compression by a factor of a thousand
AI servers with fourth and fifth generation Intel Xeon processors process the 8K live signal to send it all over the world. OBS delivers 60 frames per second in HDR with 32 audio channels in different languages. The resolution of 7680 × 4320 pixels is four times higher than 4K and corresponds to around 33 megapixels.
This results in raw data of 48 GBit/s. The servers compress it using the H.266/VVC (Versatile Video Coding) process to 40 to 60 MBit/s - around one thousandth of the original data rate. According to Intel, this currently takes around 400 milliseconds for a live transmission.
On the receiver side, Intel specifies exactly which hardware is used to decode the highly compressed signal, for example a CPU from the Core i9 series. However, the whole thing is not yet a mass event, but still has the character of a technology study: OBS only streams selected events in individual locations in 8K.
Video streams in the cloud
Broadcasters primarily receive video and audio feeds in Full HD via the OBS Live Cloud. The Chinese company Alibaba developed OBS Cloud 3.0 together with OBS for the Olympic Games in Paris. It was launched at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 2020 and two years later at the Winter Games in Beijing.
This method has since replaced satellite streaming, which was introduced in Tokyo in 1964, as the main transmission channel. According to Alibaba, two-thirds of radio and television broadcasters booked the OBS Live Cloud in 2024. This resulted in a total of 379 video and 100 audio feeds. The video streams are divided into 11 UHD and 368 HD broadcasts.
AI filters highlights of the sporting event
In addition to the live video stream, the cloud provides a whole range of additional information. Behind the somewhat unwieldy name "OBS Multi-Camera Replay System" lies software that provides slow-motion replays and still images at 14 venues and for 21 disciplines. These include rugby, badminton, athletics, basketball, beach volleyball, table tennis, tennis, wrestling, judo, breaking, BMX freestyle and skateboarding. AI systems create a spatial interpretation from the video data to output a 3D-rendered version.
The video data is provided information such as timestamps and names of the athletes as well as the type of sport, which often is still entered manually. Artificial intelligence also analyzes and evaluates each live broadcast: Intel's AI platform Geti selects what is a highlight based on video and audio data such as athlete movements, the sound of a whistle or murmurs in the audience.
The AI records the names of all athletes and rates their actions with up to five stars. With the help of this metadata, television studios can later filter out the best scenes of an athlete from the mass of video material for a documentary, for example. Such highlight videos can be found across all disciplines on the YouTube channels of Sportschau and Sportstudio, for example.
Digital athlete data
In Tokyo, the live coverage used colored stripes to trace and animate the movements of the athletes for the first time. Behind this is Intel's "3D Athlete Tracking" (3DAT), which monitors 21 points on the athlete's body.
Behind the scenes, 3DAT helps to select and train athletes. The organizing committee used the Intel software in the run-up to the 2026 Summer Youth Olympic Games in Dakar to identify promising talent.
Young athletes from eight locations each competed in six disciplines. Using video recordings, 3DAT evaluated criteria such as their reaction time and speed. Intel compared the results with AI models that had been trained with gold medal winners.
(Image: Bild: Intel)
40 out of 1000 students were selected in this way. If the system proves successful, it is likely to become standard practice in the near future. And 8K live video streams are also likely to replace the previous Full-HD standard in the long term.
Transparency note: The author was invited to the Summer Olympics in Paris by Intel. Intel covered the travel costs. There were no specifications regarding the type and scope of our reporting. (akr)
