Technology Blog: MainConcept

Behind the Scenes: Gold Medal Olympics' Content Live & On Demand

Written by Geoff Gordon | Aug 5, 2021

With the Tokyo Olympics finally a reality, though without spectators in the stands, more people than ever are viewing the games across a variety of platforms, both fixed (TVs) and mobile (smartphones, PCs). Feeding content to a multitude of device types is never easy, even in the best of circumstances. Now factor in hundreds of hours of footage, both live and canned, with complex overlays and captioning, distributed to a global audience—some in locations still significantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic! All told, tens of thousands of individuals and hundreds of companies are working tirelessly to pull off this broadcast feat.

At MainConcept, we are doing our part to assist with the successful delivery of video across platforms. With three decades relentlessly focused on quality, performance and reliability, our codecs are now deployed by dozens of companies directly involved in the distribution of Olympics' content. While we would love to highlight all of these amazing partners and how MainConcept codecs are involved, we’d be writing about them until well after the Olympic flame has been extinguished in Tokyo. Instead, here is what you will find from few of them.

 
 
 
 


Video production tools

MainConcept technologies are used to process most of the world’s professional video. The most popular video production tools have integrated our codecs. And these tools are used in virtually all broadcast control rooms sending Olympics' content to our screens.