On the early morning of July 27th, the Paris Olympics officially opened, and Alibaba Cloud fully supported the historic breakthrough of the Paris Olympics: cloud computing surpassed satellite for the first time to become the mainstream broadcasting method of the Olympics, and more than two-thirds of the signals were distributed globally based on Alibaba Cloud. The International Olympic Committee stated that this is another significant technological advancement since the satellite television broadcasting of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics began.
International Olympic Committee President Bach praised that Alibaba Cloud's cutting-edge technology is helping global broadcasting organizations convey the magical charm of the 2024 Paris Olympics, and the widely used Alibaba AI technology is taking the broadcast of the Paris Olympics to new heights.
Cloud computing has become the main broadcasting method for the Paris Olympics
The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics has attracted tremendous global attention, but it is only the beginning of the Paris Olympics. The Paris Olympics will produce 11000 hours of ultra high definition content, an increase of over 15% compared to the Tokyo Olympics, but the area of the Olympic broadcasting center has decreased by nearly 23%. Sotiris Salamouris, Chief Technology Officer of Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), stated that this is largely due to the large-scale adoption of Alibaba Cloud at the Paris Olympics.
He believes that Alibaba Cloud's infrastructure achieves global coverage, with global coverage capabilities comparable to or even higher than satellite broadcasting. But the cost of cloud broadcasting is much lower compared to satellite broadcasting. Global broadcasting agencies can easily access all the content of Olympic broadcasts. The Paris Olympics supported by Alibaba Cloud will definitely present a completely new look compared to the Tokyo Olympics three years ago.
In 2018, the International Olympic Committee began collaborating with Alibaba Cloud, followed by cloud broadcasting at the Tokyo Olympics and further deepening at the Beijing Winter Olympics. This year, at the Paris Olympics, the cloud computing platform supported by Alibaba Cloud became the main way to distribute live signals, and global audiences will watch the games through Alibaba Cloud.
He gave an example that at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago, there was a broadcaster who arrived very late, almost at the end, but made very demanding demands. They hope to obtain all live content and broadcast it in UHD format to their home country. This is impossible for satellite broadcasting. So we made our first attempt to use cloud technology. Everything went very smoothly, and the results far exceeded expectations, bringing us great surprises.
With the advent of cloud computing, Olympic broadcasting has begun to heavily utilize AI technology. The Olympic Broadcasting Service introduced that the Paris Olympics will adopt a multi camera playback system, similar to the "time and space freeze" technology in the movie "The Matrix". Hollywood studios needed several days to develop these few seconds of footage at that time. But on Alibaba Cloud, these images can be synthesized and created in just a few seconds, and directly applied to live streaming signals.