The heart of the media reactor for the next Olympic and Paralympic Games, the International Broadcast Center (IBC), is not located in the center of Paris but in the suburbs, at the Parc des Expositions du Bourget (Seine-Saint-Denis). Monday morning, a handful of media including The Team was invited to enter. An ultra-secure place where, for example, the server and cable rooms were not presented in order to keep their location secret.
In addition to the 4 satellite antennas located outside to send images of the Olympic Games around the world, 3,168 optical fibers will also be used to transport them. With, each time, two “routes” – that is to say two cables – for greater security and to counter a possible technical problem. As for possible cyberattacks, “this is a very important subject, on which we have worked for a long time with Orange to prepare our defense”assures Mario Reis, director of telecommunications at OBS, without revealing more.
In the only air-conditioned part of the IBC, huge white blocks, more or less large and closed, bring together each of the 62 broadcasters (out of nearly 200 in total) benefiting from a private space with, for some, studios and all the equipment specific to each. NBC, the American broadcaster, occupies as usual the largest space. But the nerve center is located in the “OBS Tech” block, where several rooms with multiple screens will receive the signals from the different competition sites before redistributing them throughout the world in a few milliseconds. For channels that cannot afford to travel to Paris, a service also allows up to 17 signals to be delivered simultaneously with commentary in English.
The post office, restaurants, supermarkets… enough to live independently
Today, a little more than 1,000 people have arrived in Paris but there will then be an average of 10,000 journalists and technicians and up to 13,000 at the height of the competition. Locked in huge halls all day and all night depending on the broadcasting countries, everything is done so that this little world can live independently with supermarkets, restaurants, cafeterias, wellness and hairdressing salons, dry cleaning, etc. . “The post office, for postcards, and the official store, for souvenirs, are generally very popular, assures Marie Depecker, IBC broadcast and press director. Because, ultimately, the majority will ultimately only see this of Paris during the Games ».
