A quarter million people visited the Olympic Festival

A quarter million people visited the Olympic Festival

The Olympic Festival in Brno and Ostrava has come to a close. Over the course of 17 days, the festival featured more than 30 sports and hosted over 250,000 visitors. Thank you for coming out to see us!

After the successful summer edition by the Czech Olympic Commission for the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro 2016, the organizers have declared the winter edition in Brno and Ostrava an equal success. “Olympic Festival visitors once again showed that the Czech Republic is not a country that can only come together to celebrate heroic sports performances in front of the television or in pubs, but also gets actively involved in sports. And that was the Czech Olympic Commission’s goal: to combine cheering for Czech athletes with the opportunity to actually try out sports people may have only seen on television,” shared project manager Naďa Černá.

Both Olympic Festivals presented the opportunity to try out more than 30 sports, Olympic and non-Olympic, winter and summer. Visitors could shoot a laser gun at the biathlon shooting range, try out curling, sit in a bobsleigh and jump off a ski jump – which was particularly popular with children. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the festivals were packed with school children and members of the public from early morning until closing. Guests even had to stand in line for the most popular sports.

AV technology at the Olympic Festivals

AV MEDIA and RENTAL PRO, both members of oneAVteam, handled the technical elements for both Olympic Festivals. AV MEDIA provided the two locations with more than 130 m² of outdoor LED screen walls, outdoor and indoor sound equipment, and lighting for the entire festival. We illuminated the ice using more than 500 m of LED strip lighting. We also streamed Olympic events live for guests to enjoy.

RENTAL PRO provided 600 m² of stands and stages, using 750 m of trusses and aluminium constructions for the roof over the stages and entryways. A NEXO STM sound system completed the technical equipment.

4K resolution at the festivals

AV MEDIA worked with partner CESNET on the audio-visual connection for the sports facilities where the Olympic Festival took place – the Brno Exhibition Centre and Ostravar Arena.

The connection can transmit images in 4K resolution (3840 x 2160 pixels) at 60 images per second. Input lag was just 2 ms – 1 ms of network lag and 1 ms of transmission lag. This meant the connection could be used for interactive communication – live interviews. 4K resolution has four times as much detail as Full HD. The eye no longer sees individual pixels, so the image appears completely solid.

Test transmission between the sports grounds was part of the 8KSVIP project (8K Studio Over IP), supported by the Eurostars program from the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports and European Union budgets. As part of this project we are developing scalable transmission technology for audio-visual transmissions at 8K resolution.

Photo credit: Stanislav Milata