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France Télévisions’ Romuald Rat talks to TVBEurope about his plan to broadcast the Olympic Torch Relay over a 100 percent cloud network and 5G/Starlink
The Olympic flame will arrive in France this afternoon, as it begins its adventure to the Stade de France for the opening ceremony of the XXXIII Olympiad on Friday, July 26.
As part of its journey, the Olympic flame will travel 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) through mainland France and foreign territories.
More than 1,000 boats will accompany the Torch on its arrival in Marseille, more than 150,000 people are expected to watch it arrive on French soil and millions more will watch it on television.
As the host broadcaster of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, France Télévisions will broadcast the Olympic Torch Relay over a 100 percent cloud network and 5G/Starlink.
Starting today, broadcaster france. tv’s PARIS 2024 Olympic channel will offer 10 hours of live politics.
To distribute this content, France Télévisions will deploy two convoys equipped with 8 cameras along the route.
In 2023, on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Games, the channel launched a “hypermobile broadcast” to produce a broadcast from the Seine. It used TVU Network’s cloud-based responses for production, remote collaboration, and IFB, intercom. and mix-minus management, as well as TVU One for synchronized capture of multi-camera content, and 5G networks, as well as two Starlink Maritime sets for knowledge transmission and aggregation.
And it uses much of the same cadre flow for the Olympic torch relay. Remarkably, all of this was put together in just a few months, Romuald Rat, deputy director of the TechLab de France Télévisions, told TVBEurope. “In November 2023, France Télévisions and Paris 2024 to give more visibility to the torch relay than initially planned, which gave us the opportunity to paint on those paint flows, but without much time.
“We need to be ambitious in this assignment and we have a lot of innovations,” he continues. “Everything will be new in the way we produce the cover. “
For its Tour de France policy, the broadcaster has lately used satellite to transmit data to its headquarters in Paris. But for the torch relay, the workflow will only use 4G/5G for transmission from the field. The interviews will be captured with iPhones, while a car will take over with its own 5G antenna, which will connect to Starlink.
France Télévisions has created what it describes as a bubble committed to 5G with TVU Networks, TDF and, of course, a start-up that will follow the Torch on its way. The broadcaster believes that this bubble will provide them with more security, as they will have completed what is sent to the cloud. The bubble will provide uplink bandwidth of around 500 Mbps, aggregated across all other networks. During two verification events, the team measured latency between 50 and 80 milliseconds.
The team that will run in the Relay will be equipped with two classic cameras and an iPhone that will accompany the runner with the Torch, as well as a camera with the team in motion, another on the drone and what France Télévisions calls an “agile convoy”. “. which will circulate among the public who will come to cheer on the runners. In Level City, the broadcaster plans to set up a mini-studio with on-site management, sending signals to headquarters via Starlink and TVU’s infrastructure.
“We’ll be sending live cameras to TVU’s cloud, which is based on the AWS system, and we’ll be using TVU Producer to switch cameras and mix audio,” Rat adds.
The Relay’s journalists will use TVU’s remote commentator for their audio, while their Partyline will act as an intercom between those on the pitch and the team in Paris.
“Everything will be done in the cloud,” says Rat. We want to show that we are capable of generating glass-to-glass in the cloud. We have a partnership with TVU because their software and devices are included in the end-to-end workflow.
Read the rest of our interview with France Télévisions in the May/June edition of TVBEurope. Sign up for free information here.
Jenny Priestley
Jenny has worked in media throughout her career and joined TVBEurope as Editor-in-Chief in 2017. He has also been an entertainment journalist, interviewing everyone from Kermit and Miss Piggy to Tom Hanks; and spent about 20 years appearing on radio and, infrequently, television.