One of the last projects a friend of mine worked on at his old job (before retiring and setting up a farm with his wife) was making sure that they could use every last bit of bandwidth of every copper, fibre and coax cable from the stadium to get the 2012 Olympics out to the World, and the BBC and foreign broadcasters shared all these resources so every public broadcaster in the world could get London 2012 shown in their country.
Of course it was run as a commercial venture and the broadcasters had to pay BT for the facilities but the idea of this project was clearly to make the cost of delivering this event to viewers as affordable as possible and making best use of technology (the Japanese and Chinese broadcasters turned up with a 4K pixels super HD camera they had been working on as a joint project).
Consider also that for a few weeks in 2012 a great deal of the whole world’s telly was being sourced from outer London (not W1 where they are geared up for it) for just a few weeks and this all must be done without breaking the existing telephones, internet and any other telecoms services in this area. Of course the way we achieved it was your typical British string and gaffer tape methods but ingenious (such as using the spare capacity on a HD coax cable to provide the voice comms and emails/real time chat that the broadcasters need rather than providing loads of extra circuits)
He isnt’ as much of a sports fan either but said it was one of the few worthwhile projects he had been involved in his last few years in that job.
