Crambo for Spain’s Olympic Committee

Crambo is official sponsor of the Spanish Olympic Committee (COE), and their mission is to propose technological solutions to overcome specific challenges they may encounter in their broadcast activities promoting olympic sports.

The 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games were delayed to 2021 because of the COVID pandemic, but even one year later there were still many restrictions on events in public spaces due to the on-going pandemic, and the organization still did not allow public access to the Olympic areas.

During the event, the COE wanted to maintain the contact of the athletes in Tokyo with the rest of the people in Spain: family, friends, and the press, especially when medals were won. To achieve this, Crambo thought on Edison PRO to solvethe problem of distance with athletes in Tokyo. Edison allows to take people from different physical locations and gather them on the same virtual set, so the idea seemed perfectly suited for this project and Crambo decided to carry it out.

There were three different locations, two of them in Tokyo and one in Madrid, Spain. The President of the Spanish Olympic Committee and a president of each sports federation were physically in the “House of Spain”, the institutional headquarters in the Cervantes Institute in Tokyo. On the other hand, the Spanish athletes who won medals and were to be interviewed were in the Olympic Village; and, finally, the journalist who moderated the interview and led the event was in Madrid, Spain.

The idea required testing, so two weeks before the Olympics Crambo made a quick demo of the system and the proposed workflow seemed perfect for the Spanish Olympic Committee.

Crambo used Teams and Zoom for the video transmission, because these applications allow to get their signals in NDI format, which that was very convenient as they could be seamlessly input in Crambo’s IP network. Once there, Edison was able to see the signals, process them, and combine all the signals in a virtual 3D environment to achieve the illusion of a live event, with all the talents tele-transported together to the same place. The virtual content was sent back to Tokyo, so that all the involved individuals would have video and audio return, allowing for a live conversation. On top of that, Edison allowed for including captions and other graphics.

This setup was also convenient for the press, as they were able to interview the athletes as if they were on-site. The event was also broadcasted on the YouTube channel of the Spanish Olympic Committee, as a live streaming.