Why are there differences in the same flux depending on the broadcaster!?

[sibhus]

Hello everyone,

Like every Summer Olympics, I would like to recover all the replays of my sport. For my part I would be ready to pay to be able to have this but no offer is offered (although I am sure that there will be demand) . . .
I did some research, and if I understood correctly the IOC has a section called OBS (Olympic Broadcasting Services), It takes care of capturing the Olympic Games and makes the data flow available.

The broadcasters recover the stream (according to the rights they have to pay) and retransmit it.
I did a little tour of the world of broadcasters who have the rights. There are some in every country, but you should know that behind the broadcasters there are groups.

There are many broadcasters (sometimes several per country) but they often belong to the same groups so the quality of the streams are the same.

I know that the sessions are offered in 1080p at 50fps (On Max),
I would be willing to bet that today in 2024 the sensors of the cameras that film are already in 4K, so there is a good chance that the capture will be in 4K 30 or 60fps (the quality of the image offered even for 1080p really suggests that it is 4K downgrade to 1080p).

How is it that depending on the location the streams change in FPS for the same resolutions, we found 1080p in 25, 30 and 50fps. . .

The stream, however, seems to come directly from the Olympic Broadcasting Services servers. It seems that the only thing that changes is the manifest each time and the type of protection (because they don't all have widevine L1 and L3, there is also HLS).

Don't you think that on the server the quality is the highest, and that it sends to the user what the user requests via the manifest (which is written to him by the broadcasters according to what 'they had to pay to retransmit!?)

How to explain that a 1080p stream can be encrypted in L1 on one side but only in L3 or even HLS on the other ?

Do you think it is possible to slightly modify a manifest to change a 1080p stream from 25/30 to 50fps or is this determined directly on the server and it cannot be modified!?

Thanks for anyone who can share information on this.