Reuters Sports: Innovating the distribution of Winter Olympics content

There is no challenge quite like covering the Olympics, and no better opportunity for newsgathering technologies to get their chance to shine in prime time.

At Reuters, our job as a news agency has traditionally been to collect and distribute the raw materials used by newsrooms to support their own reporting to their own individual audiences. The Olympics, with its combination of scale, predictability and preparation time, presents the opportunity to break tradition and roll out innovations that become the new normal for future coverage.

Reuters gathers multimedia coverage that combines local reporting with a global perspective. Our video teams operate from within as well as outside ‘the bubble’ of the games to produce clips from training, fan reactions from on-the-ground and back home, press conferences, protests, athlete interviews, and much more. Our photographers are capturing nearly every move the athletes make inside the stadiums and transmitting them all in real time. Our graphics team finds new ways to present the ever-growing deluge of data that come with each event, and our text journalists follow every thread and angle occurring in places where it’s harder than ever to move around, due to Covid.

For each event, we produce about 50% more than the one before. More stories, with more sidebars. More video, with longer edits. More pictures, with higher resolution. All delivered with increasing speed. These types of advances are down to using better technology and finding partners who do the same.

But what good is all this content if our clients can’t find the best bits for their audiences? Or can’t use the content at the speed we’re delivering it? More than once, I’ve heard our clients compare newswires to ‘firehoses’ of content. And it’s pretty hard for them to drink from a firehose.

So, in 2021 and 2022, we made it our mission to master the art of metadata in real time. This supercharged metadata helps our clients instantly find the materials related to the sports, stadiums, athletes and countries that interest their audiences most. Content so smart it knows where to go in a customer’s CMS or can be published automatically with confidence with just a little preparation by an editor. Now, we can make that firehose as narrow as a straw, focused on delivering only the content a client needs, in sips they can swallow.

Innovation has been driven by necessity – broadcasters have to maximise the return on investments made in securing the Olympics, which is never easy when the games present so much in parallel and much of the action happens when Western countries have been sleeping. Another necessity is enabling emerging OTT platforms capture attention in an overcrowded market.

Placing Olympics programming onto these OTT platforms has been a way to use one problem to start to solve the other. We are now more likely than ever to login to an app to watch the Olympics instead of tuning in on traditional TV.

These new platforms benefit even more than traditional newsrooms from our use of data and metadata standards in our real-time feeds. Assembling highlights, photos and results to accompany content presented in these applications helps platforms differentiate their digital and OTT experiences in ways that will surely be expanded to coverage of other sports in the coming years.

The time shift for so many fans is also driving interest and use beyond the OTT video platforms. Despite the perception that interest in the 2021 games was diminished compared to 2016, search traffic was up, and the introduction of home assistants increased the demand for content supported by smarter data, automatically routed to consumers who ask for it.

It’s nearly impossible to predict what technology advances will develop at Reuters, or elsewhere, in the next two years as ’the great reboot’ leads us into ’the new normal’, but you can be sure that we will be leading the way and innovating for our clients in Paris in 2024.

 Rob Schack is director at Reuters Sports