During the Milano Cortina Olympics, the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) introduced a new product, “Spacetime Slice” technology, in collaboration with Alibaba Cloud. The technology used a “Cloud-first” approach that enabled increased data management across various sports and three-dimensional analysis of what is happening in 17 different sports, from figure skating to freestyle skiing.

The OBS placed a collection of cameras that captured footage from every possible angle and fed it to an AI that used technological algorithms to create a three-dimensional reconstruction of the footage in 15 to 20 seconds. This feature creates a stroboscopic effect that displays the different phases of a quadruple cork in high-speed motion, generating three-dimensional images of various events at the Olympic Games.

Aside from improving viewers’ experience, this technology enables 65 percent of broadcast signals to be produced in the cloud, helping reduce the International Broadcast Centre’s size by 25 percent and its power consumption by a third.

With all these enhancements, this technology has improved the company’s ability to produce over 6,000 hours of broadcast footage and content on cloud infrastructures and introduced an innovative way for viewers to experience the Olympic events. Furthermore, this scalable technology can be used for a variety of other events and initiatives, showing how artificial intelligence and Cloud technologies can collaborate to change the world’s sports and broadcast arenas.