Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) is planning a major expansion of its virtualized, cloud-based infrastructure for the 2028 Los Angeles Games. Most of what's changing won't show up on a site tour.

The Ranch Lot, a production facility in Burbank, California, spans 30 acres and is roughly the size of 23 football fields, spread across a working Warner Bros. Studios campus with 16 soundstages. For LA28, though, that's still all in the future. LA28 says preparations to convert part of it into the International Broadcast Center for the 2028 Olympics could begin as early as January 2027, with the fit-out itself scheduled to start that year.

There is no broadcast infrastructure to point a camera at yet. That gap between now and 2027 is the point. OBS told rights holders at a briefing last year that LA28 will shift to a fully internet protocol and information technology-based infrastructure, and it reaffirmed that direction at a follow-up meeting in Los Angeles last month. Its next-generation architecture will be built on virtualization, cloud workflows, and systems designed to support artificial intelligence. Where past games required equipment compounds and racks of dedicated hardware, a growing share of LA28's broadcast capability will instead be configured in software.

The July meeting drew roughly 270 people, including more than 150 representatives from 44 media rights-holder organizations. 

OBS CEO Yiannis Exarchos opened the session alongside LA28 CEO Reynold Hoover, telling the room the buildup was on schedule and crediting the daily coordination behind it.

For decades, host broadcasting meant physical scale trucks parked at every venue, racks of dedicated hardware in a central compound, miles of fiber and coax tying it all together. OBS has spent the last several Olympic Games chipping away at that model, one function at a time.

The clearest example is the Virtual OB Van. It moves core functions traditionally housed in a production truck– switching, replay, and audio processing– onto specialized software running on commercial off-the-shelf servers. OBS piloted an early version at Beijing 2022, based at the curling venue, before expanding the project through Paris 2024 and into Milano Cortina 2026, where it covered curling, sliding, and speed skating. OBS said the approach could cut required compound space by about 50%, on top of trimming power draw and installation time.

Exarchos described the shift in January as what the industry has started calling ‘software-enabled broadcasting.’ "Essentially using normal, very powerful servers and overlaying very specialized broadcast software on it." 

He recalled broadcasters rejecting the idea that equipment costing $150,000 could simply be swapped for a $1,500 computer, and agreed the two aren't directly equivalent. His point was narrower. Under the right surrounding architecture, standardized servers can increasingly do what dedicated hardware once did.

OBS CTO Sotiris Salamouris framed LA28 as a waypoint, not a finish line. 

"We are about 50% of the way there now," he said of OBS's broader transition toward cloud-based production. 

Los Angeles marks the next expansion. OBS is targeting full conversion around 2030.

The July briefing reads less like a single leap than the next step in a trend OBS has tracked publicly for three games running. Its Live Cloud remote-distribution service had 22 subscribers at Beijing 2022. At Paris 2024, OBS Live Cloud became the primary method of remote signal distribution for the first time, carrying 379 video and 100 audio feeds and serving two-thirds of booked remote services across 54 broadcasters. The Paris International Broadcast Center (IBC) came in 13% smaller than Tokyo 2020's and 23% smaller than Rio 2016's, even as OBS made roughly 11,000 hours of content available.

Heading into Milano Cortina 2026, OBS said it planned to transmit 65% of broadcast signals through the cloud, well past the 25% adoption rate it had originally projected, and expected the Winter Games IBC to draw 33% less power than Beijing 2022's. Before LA28's split-campus arrangement was announced, OBS said in January it expected the Los Angeles IBC footprint to be roughly half the size of Rio 2016's while supporting more than double Rio's content volume.

Those numbers predate LA28's most consequential logistical decision. 

The International Olympic Committee's Executive Board approved a split-campus plan in June, finalized by LA28 on 9 July. The Ranch Lot in Burbank will hold the IBC itself. Hollywood Park Studios, a separate facility in LA28's Inglewood Zone, will support Main Press Center operations, provide space for broadcasters' live stand-ups, and handle other Games-time functions. The ceremonies, swimming and basketball competitions that also fall within the Inglewood Zone will take place at nearby venues, not inside the studio facility itself. That arrangement replaces LA28's original 2025 plan to house the entire IBC at Hollywood Park alone, a plan that came with its own now-superseded projection - 19% smaller than Paris 2024, 38% smaller than Rio 2016.

None of this means the physical games vanish into the cloud. Exarchos has been blunt about the limits of virtualization even as OBS pushes toward it. Despite planning its heaviest cloud deployment yet at Milano Cortina, OBS projected roughly 6,000 broadcasters would still work on-site there. Rights holders want proximity to their athletes. And no single broadcaster can staff a home studio for the 27 events that can run simultaneously at an Olympics, let alone the ones lacking the remote capacity to work any other way.

That's the real shape of the shift. Not the elimination of broadcast infrastructure. The migration of more of its capability from trucks, racks, and dedicated appliances into software is much harder to photograph. LA28's production plans still call for 3,800 to 4,000 hours of competition and ceremonies coverage across 51 Olympic sport disciplines, using production tools including first-person-view drones, real-time 360-degree replay, and microphones on officials and coaches. 

Shana Ferguson, LA28's Chief of Sport and Games Delivery Officer, called the Ranch Lot "a purpose-built production campus" for capturing and sharing what she described as the defining moments of the Games. The IBC fit-out is scheduled to begin in early 2027; a third and final World Broadcaster Meeting is set for summer 2027, roughly a year before the Games open.

By the time competition begins on 14 July 2028, the compute infrastructure installed across the Burbank campus will be doing work that once required racks of dedicated appliances and larger fleets of production trucks. The physical center doesn't disappear. Cameras, networks, power, cooling, and people are still indispensable. What changes is where the capability lives.

This summer's other AV story was World Cup host cities bolting permanent video boards into stadium roofs, infrastructure built to outlast the tournament by decades. LA28 is closer to the opposite bet –infrastructure whose value lies partly in its portability, with more of its capability defined in software rather than locked inside a particular truck or hardware box.