How 5G phones mean you can watch athletes sail down the River Seine during the Paris 2024 opening ceremony
More than 200 Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra phones will livestream footage from 85 athlete boats
Tonight’s Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony is going to be rather different. It’s the first such event to not be held in a stadium.
But with events taking place along a 6km stretch of the River Seine and with 10,500 athletes and huge numbers of boats involved, there’s a problem – how do you get close up enough to film everyone on the boats and get hold of the footage?
The answer is that HDR footage will be livestreamed from more than 200 Galaxy S24 Ultra smartphones that Samsung and Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) have stuck to the bow and sides of each of the 85 athlete boats.
The connectivity part of the puzzle has been solved by French mobile network Orange who have installed antennas along the Seine as part of a private 5G network (known as 5G standalone) just for the purpose of the opening ceremony. As you can see from the image below, the phones are attached to a beefier 5G antenna.
The route starts at the Austerlitz bridge and athletes will pass by numerous landmarks and Olympic venues before they finish at the Trocadéro on the other side of the river from the Eiffel Tower.
The same tech will also be used for the sailing competitions in Marseille, taking place some 660km from Paris. Because of the different conditions on the sea, this presented a whole new set of challenges for the broadcast crew in terms of the video quality. Orange also had to make sure the 5G standalone connectivity worked across an open body of water, too, and in different conditions from windy with waves to hot and sunny. The problem was solved by increasing the power used for the 5G signals as well as installing relay towers on the chase boat.
Samsung has been involved with the Olympics since 1998 when it had a ‘Call home’ program for athletes to speak to their families in their home countries. It followed this up with the Wireless Olympic Works (WOW) app in 2004, the first official Olympic information service on mobile. Both seem rather quaint by today’s standards. This year it has given all the athletes a special Olympic Edition of the Galaxy Z Flip6 – read our Galaxy Z Flip6 review.
Dan Grabham
Editor-in-Chief