At the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, Eurosport had a massive job on its hands – delivering content to 47 markets in 19 languages. Responsible for the delivery of multi-language commentary across all 329 events involving 10,500 athletes, providing live coverage across Eurosport’s linear channels including eight dedicated popup channels and live streaming of every event live on Max and Discovery+ – the only places to watch every minute of the Olympics in Europe.
Finding the space, hardware, and labour force to repurpose so much content to so many individual markets would prove challenging even for the biggest broadcasters, but with an event of this stature, every broadcaster was looking to exceed expectations and maximize content creation.
Using a software-led solution to automate all of its international commentary tracks remotely, Eurosport worked with Lama to develop and refine a centralized, software-based audio production approach. This allowed them to deliver industry standard broadcast mixes to all its markets in Europe.
In Paris, Eurosport needed to ensure that every moment of the Games was available live and on replay across multiple languages and a selection of events for each of its linear channels. With multiple coverage combinations across different venues, locations, and sports, Eurosport needed a way to automate each commentary feed and associate it with the right international mixes directly from the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) in Paris.
“Eurosport is unique in the number of languages it supports,” said Ewan Cameron, Ross Video’s Senior Business Development Director for Audio Systems. “It has many independent and culturally distinctive markets to supply, challenges further compounded by many simultaneous events.”
“Doing everything with traditional hardware workflows would have been impossible; in addition to the cost of acquisition for all the hardware, there is finding the space to locate everything, the installation and interconnectivity costs, and the power and resulting environmental impact needed to run it. And that’s before you consider the human cost of labour, recruitment, and training to do everything in real time.”
Lama AutoMix offered Eurosport an intelligent, software-first technology that can operate on a PC, an in-house data centre, or in the public cloud. It allowed them to connect multiple audio signals from commentators, international mixes and video sources, and generate a balanced output that adhered to broadcast standards.
Its ‘connect & forget’ approach took unprocessed microphone feeds and adjusted them in accordance with a predefined target, automatically detecting and adjusting bleed and dynamically levelling speech from multiple sources. By using intelligent content recognition, it also identified important sounds within the original signal and ensured their level was adjusted to within a standard loudness range.
For broadcasters like Eurosport, whose business is all about capturing the unpredictable and passionate roar of the crowd, maintaining this full dynamic and real time control of an events ambiance is crucial.
At Paris 2024, Eurosport hosted multiple Lama AutoMix instances across two data centres in London and Hilversum, providing all of Eurosport’s regional markets with remote access to every AutoMix instance via a web-based UI. Each AutoMix engine took a commentary feed from each individual commentator and mixed it with the international sound feed to create a broadcast-ready mix which was available for international users to pick up on both digital and linear broadcast outputs.
Over the course of the event, Eurosport delivered more than 15,000 commentary sessions and over 24,000 hours of coverage from more than 400 commentators across Europe, with up to 300 Lama AutoMix instances running simultaneously on peak days.
Automation enabled Eurosport to scale without compromising quality. By applying pre-defined mixing parameters, AutoMix ensured a consistent sound across every international market, regardless of variations in incoming commentary feeds. “The consistency of quality is something we’re very proud of,” says Cameron. “Using one system to deliver a uniform mix across multiple territories gave us confidence both creatively and operationally.”
A centralized production model also resolved long-standing sync challenges. All 120 physical commentary units were connected to the same network as the international sound and mixed centrally, ensuring commentary and program audio remained perfectly aligned.
To ensure resilience, Eurosport distributed AutoMix across data centres in London and Hilversum, making every instance accessible from any of 18 mix positions across Europe. With built-in redundancy, the system could seamlessly continue even if one site went offline, proving that software-first audio workflows can deliver both reliability and scale.
Lama AutoMix automates audio mixing with adaptive DSP for balance, EQ, compression, and noise control. It delivers clear, compliant mixes using presets or custom tuning — ideal for consistent, polished speech production anywhere.
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