As per recent tradition, Alibaba Cloud is back yet again to team up with the Olympic Broadcasting Services and the International Olympic Committee to power the Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 with its industry-leading AI-based tech for scaling and intelligence.
On the viewing side, one of the headline upgrades is a new Real-Time 360º Replay system that is capable of separating athletes from tricky backgrounds like snow and ice to generate full 3D reconstructions of key moments in just 15 to 20 seconds, fast enough to slot straight into live broadcasts. It’ll be used across 17 sports, from ice hockey and figure skating to ski jumping, and alongside the familiar BulletTime effects, there’s now a new Spacetime Slices feature that shows multiple phases of an athlete’s movement in a single image, making technique and performance easier to understand at a glance.
Behind the scenes, OBS is also working on a new Automatic Media Description system powered by Alibaba’s Qwen LLM. Instead of teams manually tagging clips, the system can automatically identify athletes and key moments, generate descriptions, and tag video assets within seconds. Broadcasters can then pull up footage using natural language searches like “find the figure skating gold medal performance,” which dramatically speeds up storytelling and content distribution across platforms.
Cloud-based broadcasting continues to become the default too, as OBS Live Cloud, which started as an optional service at Tokyo 2020, has now become a core distribution platform. For Milano Cortina 2026, it will support 39 broadcasters with 428 live video feeds, including 26 in UHD, plus 72 audio feeds, cutting down on satellite links, setup time, and technical complexity. For the first time, the OBS Olympic Video Player will also stream HD live content using Alibaba Cloud’s infrastructure, opening the door for smaller broadcasters to access professional-grade coverage without massive upfront costs.
They will also be publishing more content to make up more than 5,000 short-form digital assets, from behind-the-scenes clips to emotional reactions, and these will be distributed via OBS Content+, a cloud platform powered by Alibaba Cloud that lets teams around the world quickly find, edit, and publish content no matter where they’re based.
Milano Cortina 2026 also marks the first use of LLM technologies in Olympic history through the rollout of “Olympic AI Assistants” by the IOC. It is powered by Alibaba’s Qwen models, supporting everything from fan engagement to internal operations. For the former, it is utilized to serve visitors of the official website via multilingual, chat-based access to official content and real-time event information, while visitors to the Olympic Museum in Lausanne will be able to use personalised AI audio guides. Internally, National Olympic Committees will have access to a secure AI assistant that helps staff find documents, policies, and grant guidelines using natural language queries, complete with built-in translation.
All of this feeds into Alibaba Cloud’s evolving Sports AI platform, which now manages more than 8PB of historical Olympic media. With AI tagging, conversational search, and deep integration with the IOC’s media systems, the archive is turning decades of footage into a living, searchable knowledge base that can surface specific moments with simple spoken or written commands.
