AEQ’s Commentary Systems instrumental at last years’ largest Multi -Sport and -Venue event in Paris
With more than 1000 commentary units to service the rights holding broadcasters
Last July marked the start of the world’s largest multi-sport and multi-venue event. The first ones back “on-track” after the pandemic. The scale of this event is difficult to fathom; this edition featured a total of 52 venues, 32 sports and 48 different disciplines. A total of about 10,200 athletes from the 206 NOCs participated.
The events host broadcaster had chosen AEQ as the Commentary System Solutions provider for this edition. This was the 17th time AEQ technology has been relied upon for this event, the first time being back in 1992 in Barcelona.
As part of a renovation and transition to a more flexible system and entirely based upon IP technology, AEQ supplied a total of 550 Olympia 3 AoIP Network Commentary Units for the fully equipped Commentary Units throughout the 52 competition venues and the Off-tube booths at the International Broadcast Center -IBC- in Paris.
AEQ OLYMPIA 3 commentary unit can work as standalone or as part of an AoIP multichannel Network. The AoIP connectivity is Dante/AES67, and allows for integration with AEQ’s Intercom Systems or connected to an AoIP Commentary System matrix for large, multi-venue, multi-sport events.
On this occasion, AEQ worked in close collaboration with the events Host Broadcasting Organisation for the engineering and supply of the commentary system to be used. The system built for the occasion was a “hybrid” system and integrated the Host Broadcasters’ incumbent system OLYMPIA also from AEQ and that has bee in use since 2010. For the contribution network to/from each Venues’ Technical Operations Center – TOC – and the IBC, the Host Broadcaster also used the AEQ XCore Frames to convey the signals in either AoIP format or long distance MADI links. In reality, the brunt of the system engineering was a major software development to enable the current system Olympia and the new Olympia 3 with native AoIP, to coexist and be operated completely transparently. It has to be highlighted that the differences between the two systems are radical, the Olympia relying entirely on XCore Matrix Frames and the OLYMPIA 3 counting on all the processing power “on-board”. The total number of Commentary units deployed were in excess of 1.200 throughout the 52 competition venues. The largest and most important venues from a circuit perspective, such as the athletics stadium, were using the new Olympia 3 Units.
For support operations, AEQ provided with four engineers from Madrid to assist the Host Broadcaster in the set-up of the commentary system and Games operations.
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