Alibaba Cloud helps deliver a more inclusive and sustainable 2022 Winter Olympics
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Beijing Organizing
Committee for the 2022
Olympic and Paralympic
Winter Games have successfully migrated core games technology services to Alibaba Cloud.
The move aims at creating a safer, more efficient, sustainable, and inclusive experience for participants and audiences from around the world. The services now running on Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure include the games management systems, Olympics management systems and Olympics distribution systems.
Taking advantage of the cloud infrastructure’s scalability, reliability and security features, event organisers like the IOC can reduce the complexity of the game planning based on intelligence-driven decisions, striking the right balance between optimising existing resources and creating new ones. That way, hosting cities can also reduce the time and costs associated with the legacy physical infrastructure investment upfront.
The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics showcased a series of technological innovations developed to bring more inclusive experiences for fans in multiple locations. One of them is Cloud ME, which facilitates remote social interactions by enabling people to meet and converse with each other’s life-sized, true-to-life persona projections.
Alibaba also unveiled Dong Dong, a virtual influencer from Beijing who was designed to interact with fans globally, sharing fun and informative Olympics-related facts. From Feb 4 to 20, Dong Dong’s live streams have received more than two million views, and she has a fan base of more than 100,000.
Additionally, the partnership with Alibaba saw the distribution of live signals of the Olympic Games over the cloud for the first time. Through the Olympic Winter Games, 6,000 hours of footage were produced by the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) and broadcasted to more than 220 countries and territories.
The OBS Video Server, which was fully hosted in the cloud, provides rights holding broadcasters (RHBs) with an efficient and scalable system while reducing onsite hardware investment. It allows RHBs to access all content produced during the Olympic Winter Games, including the live coverage, remotely with ease. Since the Olympic Games-related contents can be transmitted over the public cloud, it also helps to reduce the carbon footprint of broadcasting-related operations.