The Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games will redefine how top-class sport is produced, distributed and consumed.
For Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), the games won’t be about innovation for innovation’s sake. Chief executive officer Yiannis Exarchos believes technology is an enabler rather than the end goal.
The objective remains to bring fans closer to the athletes, emotion and competition. However, we are about to witness new levels of scale, speed and sophistication, thanks to technology.
AI-Powered Storytelling
Artificial intelligence (AI) will play a massive role in broadcasting Milano Cortina 2026. Al will help to produce real-time 360-degree replays, developed in collaboration with Alibaba.
Viewers will be able to rotate around the action within seconds. They can view freeze frames and slow-motion angles using multi-camera feeds combined with stroboscopic analysis.
Curling will debut an AI-powered stone-tracking system that visualises speed, rotation and trajectory in real time, making complicated tactics easy to follow.
Sliding sports such as bobsleigh, skeleton and luge will deploy first-person-view drones to follow athletes even when they are moving at top speed. It provides a more immersive perspective.
Innovative tools such as Olympic GPT will deliver verified, real-time results, rules and explanations. AI-powered media description platforms will also break broadcasts into easily searchable clips.
These highlight systems produced over 100,000 unique clips at the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris. However, this will be the first Winter Games to deploy this tech at scale, putting key moments instantly across platforms.
Betting, Data & the British Market
The explosion of real-time data, angles, and automated highlights will have a significant knock-on effect on the betting industry, particularly in Great Britain.
Team GB is sending 53 athletes to Italy across curling, skeleton, snowboarding and freestyle skiing. Online betting activity will spike when they are competing.
The best betting apps listed on comparison platform bettingtop10 are offering a vast array of pre-event markets on the Winter Olympics. They will also have live odds when the events start.
AI-powered broadcasts give betting broadcasters more accurate data feeds, leveraging modern tracking and insights to support in-play markets, odds modelling and personalised content.
Technology also supports responsible gambling, helping to flag unhealthy patterns and ensure compliance even as engagement increases.
Training the Next Generation
Technology is not only changing what audiences see, but it is also revamping who gets to tell these captivating stories.
OBS has a Broadcast Training Programme and will take 650 of their finest into the frontlines of production at Milano Cortina.
Many Olympic medallists successfully transition into commentary and production when they retire from competition, bringing their renowned expertise to the table.
OBS’ goal is not to deliver a one-off spectacle, but implement a philosophy that mirrors the company’s permanent host broadcaster model introduced in 2001.
Cloud, Virtualisation & Sustainability
There has been a seismic shift to cloud-based infrastructure behind the scenes, which is proving transformative.
Virtual OBS vans are expected to replace traditional broadcast trucks across venues, reducing space and power usage by 50 percent.
OBS has been pushing for sustainability, so there are plans to reduce the number of International Broadcast Centres covering successive Games while improving output quality.
Remote production has been refined at Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024. It should play an even bigger role at Milano Cortina 2026.
OBS can deliver world-class coverage across Milan, Cortina, Livorno and other venues without duplicated infrastructure by centralising workflows and making operations virtual.
Consequently, coverage is more efficient and has a lower environmental impact.
Hyper-Targeted Coverage Across Europe
While OBS revamp production style, broadcasters such as Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) Sports will revolutionise distribution.
Their bespoke new in-house platform iBuild has been set up to take hundreds of OBS feeds and distribute them seamlessly across 47 European markets in 21 languages.
Every market has access to every camera, and coverage can be curated to local sports tastes. This development will be particularly important at the Winter Games, more than any other event.
For example, ski jumping is very popular in Germany and Poland, while biathlon garners the most viewers from France. Great Britian loves curling, bobsleigh and luge.
Streaming has also accelerated this development, as viewers now increasingly expect to watch what they want, when they want, instead of following a single linear schedule.
