SIMON FARNSWORTH, DISCOVERY CTO, HIGHLIGHTS THE CHALLENGES DISCOVERY FACES TO PUT ON BEIJING 2022

Can you give an idea of the complexity that you and your team face to ensure viewers across Europe can watch the Games in so many ways?
The Olympic Games by its very nature is extremely complicated as you have a large number of simultaneous sports going on at any one time. For Beijing, the biggest day will have 15 simultaneous events and when you’re broadcasting that across 19 different languages in 50 markets across Europe with 150 control rooms from Norway down to Madrid through those countries, you get complex pretty quick. So, there is an enormous amount of complexity across our network.

Discovery are clearly at the forefront of broadcast and streaming technology – as well as to a scale nobody else is attempting. Who is the team behind this?
We’re fortunate to have an amazing team of people. At the moment, we’ve got around 50 people in Beijing building our broadcast operations centre as well as all of our capture elements in the venues. So when we’ve got presenters, reporters and journalists at the venue capturing all the amazing content, then when we come back to Europe we’ve got about 3,500 kilometres of fibre optic cable, as well as satellite feeds bringing feeds back into Europe to London and then distributing that out to all of our production folks as well as recording… we’ve got about 1,000 people back in Europe working on the Olympics, so a huge shout out to those people helping to get this on air.


How far has Discovery’s technology capabilities come since it delivered its first Games in PyeongChang four years ago?
We’ve made huge improvements since 2018. We’ve been on a journey since PyeongChang to modernise Discovery and Eurosport’s infrastructure to allow us to move into a digital age and we’ve invested a huge amount of time modernising those control rooms. We now have central ingest points which allows all of our editors and production folks to ingest any piece of content. They can start editing and distribute to social media, digital platforms, linear platforms.

We’ve invested a huge amount. As well as having Cube in PyeongChang, we’ve now built green screens all across Europe so we can teleport people in. We’re going to do that from Beijing if the Covid environment allows us just so we can give the viewers the best experience.

Are you able to give us any anecdotes that highlight the challenges you and your team face? And how you are overcoming them?
It can be exciting but also nerve-wracking. For example in PyeongChang we had fibre optic cables breaking due to earthquakes in Taiwan, we had diggers in Edmonton in Canada digging up cables so we have teams round the clock monitoring this 24/7 to ensure we give you guys the presenters the best chance to provide the best possible experience for our consumers.

GT&O Technology – Facts and Figures for Beijing 2022

• How many 'teleportation' or green screen studios do we have across Europe? Six
• How many kilometres of fibre optic cable are we using to put on our Games time coverage? 3,254kms – enough for a round trip between Tokyo and Beijing
• How many dedicated GT&O or tech operatives do we have working on the Games? 1,400 – half the amount of athletes taking part in the Olympic Winter Games
• How many commentary sessions will there be during the Games? 13,701
• How many commentary sessions will we have in a single day? 475
• How many markets will Discovery's Olympic coverage be shown in? 50
• How many languages will Discovery's Olympic coverage be shown in? 19
• How many hours will be broadcast on Eurosport's linear channels? 365 hours
• How many video audio switches will be deployed? 12.7 million
• How many PCRs, SCRs, MFRs, DMRs, MCRs and TX will be set up? 150

And finally....Discovery are operating over 300,000 pieces of kit and software applications during Beijing 2022!

Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 begins on Wednesday 2 February with coverage of every medal from every event LIVE on discovery+ (selected markets) and Eurosport