Paris 2024: OBS gets up close and personal to capture Olympic spirit

The IOC’s broadcast of the 2024 Olympic Games will be bigger, faster, leaner and more data-fuelled than ever before, no doubt reaching a record-breaking audience online and on TV too. But for all the panoply of tech tools trained on athletes, spectators and vistas in Paris, there is one deceptively simple mission for the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) - to communicate the Olympic spirit.

“Unlike traditional broadcasting, which was one broadcaster talking to mass audiences, now we also have capacity to collect individual reactions,” enthuses Yiannis Exarchos, CEO of OBS. “For me, this opportunity is fascinating because it can lead to a gradual and complete democratisation of storytelling. It can mean the virtual participation of every single person in this common human narrative. That is the Olympic Games.”

Exarchos’ Olympic journey began assisting the Athens bidding committee in 1997. He helped set up the host broadcasting operation for the Athens 2004 Games and subsequently the IOC’s own host operation, OBS, which it took in-house to better manage the sheer scale and complexity of the job.

Exarchos has long wrestled with what it would mean to the viewer experience - and the fate of...