Alibaba puts Olympics on the cloud, adding AI services while taking over for satellite

The Chinese tech giant has partnered with the Olympics to distribute the Paris Games online, replacing a 60-year-old satellite system as the main distribution channel

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Published: 3:00pm, 26 Jul 2024

Alibaba Group Holding’s cloud computing unit is offering an artificial intelligence (AI)-infused platform to support the broadcasting of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, taking over a satellite broadcasting adopted six decades ago as the main method of distribution.

Alibaba Cloud and the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) launched OBS Cloud 3.0 to help media outlets to get images and videos of the Games, Alibaba said in a statement on Thursday. OBS is a subsidiary of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the organiser of the Paris Games, which oversees the distribution of event coverage. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

This marks “the first time in the history of the Olympic Games” that a cloud platform is the main method of content distribution, taking over from satellite which was launched during the Olympics Games Tokyo 1964”, Alibaba said in a statement.

This year’s Games are the first since Microsoft-backed OpenAI debuted its groundbreaking conversational chatbot ChatGPT at the end of 2022. The launch triggered a global AI gold rush, in which the Olympics organisers are now participating with the use of generative AI meant to improve viewer experience.

The Chinese e-commerce powerhouse has previously said that its proprietary Tongyi Qianwen large language models (LLMs) – the technology that underpins chatbots like ChatGPT – will be used to assist the official commentators during the Games.