EURORADIO @ 2015 FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in Vail / Beaver Creek

Speeding through the gates

EURORADIO successfully launched a Digital Radio visual service during the European Athletics Championships in Zürich in August 2014.
Two years after an initial cooperation in Schladming, the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships presented a perfect and exciting opportunity to further develop the concept and take the service to new audiences world-wide.

Once more several EBU departments worked with a team of software engineers to develop a visual CMS.
This tool was designed to ingest and rapidly publish graphically-pleasing data from Swiss Timing as well as content from social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram.

Images for radio

Incoming data from Swiss Timing was rendered to still images in the form of Start Lists, Intermediate Timings, Results or Medal Tables.
Additional content from Instagram and Twitter was generated onsite by the "Visual producer".

Tailor-made images were selected and pushed LIVE using the CMS to create a visual stream made available to broadcasters to use on their Digital Radio services.
In addition, the CMS created a slide show that could be embedded on radio broadcasters’ websites.

Digital Radio Distribution

EURORADIO members' website embeds

From National to Local

3,303,470

IP connections to the visual radio stream

Server message delivery throughout the championships

Global access to EURORADIO server during the Men's Downhill

And the winners are... total images served through member websites

Keeping the audio on track

The slide show also appeared on the EUROVISION Sports Live  app which combined the EURORADIO International Signal with an audio mix generated by an on-site "audio producer".
From feeds available in the International Broadcast Centre, he created LIVE programmes mixing commentary from stadium announcers, natural sound from the TV international signal and post-race interviews.

A EURORADIO Young Reporter conducted interviews in the mixed zone.
A former competition skier at European level, he had the right mix of professional awe and respect in order to bring out the best in the athletes who stopped at his position.
His interviews were not only used on the LIVE stream, but also uploaded to the EURORADIO FIS Sports Exchange platform for use by media organisations worldwide.
In addition his interviews were used on a World Feed generated by EUROVISION and EPC.

858 Audio Files

Flash & mixed zone interviews, commentary, press conferences (in native tongue and english in most cases)

3,063 streams & downloads

By radio broadcasters and the press

Thank you very much for the service you provided. It was a great help and we've been very satisfied with the content (especially because of the many Austrian medals of course).

The FIS audio files service was a great help to us at Beaver Creek as this was our 'first-stop shop' for quick quotes after every race at the alpine ski world championships.

Thank you very much for the great service! We used the platform very frequently and I can only say: It really helped us making the world championship sound bigger!

The most positive thing: the great amount of German interviews. Really great!

I can say I heard many compliments on the system from those in the press center and your team was a pleasure to work with!

"Thank you" for the great interview service at the Alpine Skiing World Champs in Vail. The interviews were an enrichment for our radio news.

Thank you for the great service! The audio clips were a main component of our coverage.

Social Media : the snowball effect

Many of the interviews conducted in the mixed zone were published to SoundCloud using a clever web tool called IfThisThenThat that would also forward the audio to a blog on Tumblr.

EURORADIO's Young Reporter, as a “Digital Native”, was comfortable and confident generating his own behind-the-scenes content using Bobler (quick-fire audio), Magisto (video montages), Vine (looping videos), Moldiv and PicPlayPost (photo montages) as well as Hyperlapse (time-lapse videos).
The content was collated into a blog on Tumblr and Storify. The whole team also collaborated internally using a tool called Slack.

> 2682 Plays

Of 161 audio files uploaded throughout the championships, the total number of plays has exceeded 2682.

The Vail2015 legacy

This event demonstrated once again that EURORADIO is at the forefront of digital innovation in the radio sphere. Visual services on Digital Radio have an exciting future and the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships absolutely proved their worth in sports broadcasting.

The radio sector is continuing to suffer from budget restrictions and needs to find new slopes for reaching audiences on their platforms and services. Using free apps and services, the team successfully delivered exciting content on social media - above and beyond the traditional landscape of radio services.

EURORADIO Vail Team: Giulio Gasparin, Christophe Pasquier & Micky Curling

February 2015