Live From Tokyo Olympics: Inside Look at NBC's IBC Innovation Efforts By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Monday, August 2, 2021 - 11:11 pm
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The pandemic might have stopped the Olympics for a year, but it didn't stop NBC Olympics' commitment to innovation. In fact, it accelerated it: any innovations at the NBC Olympics IBC plant that the team wanted in place for the Beijing Games in February 2022 had to be ready for Tokyo 2020. NBC Olympics' Todd Donovan, VP, engineering technology; Kevin Callahan, manager, system design engineering, and Lukas Zahas, senior manager, broadcast technology, discussed how the broadcaster's IBC plant evolved during the pandemic.
From left: Kevin Callahan, Lukas Zahas, and Todd Donovan inside the NBC Olympics production-control room at the IBC in Tokyo.
Can you talk a bit about the one-year delay and how that impacted the facility here at the IBC?
Donovan: When the Games got canceled, everything was on the boat on its way to Tokyo, so the boat came back. While it was in transit, we spent some time rethinking the two-Games model and what technology we would need to get us through the Tokyo Games and set us up where we wanted to be for the Beijing Games because there would be no time to retool.
One of the big things to rethink was that separating a 1080i SDR signal for a large audience and a 1080p HDR for a smaller audience didn't seem like the best answer. And, based on our experience with Notre Dame Football and some other projects, single-stream production seemed right. So the team spent a lot of time retooling. Fortunately, with the IP routing environment and the VSM software layer and the fact that we had just rebuilt the place, it wasn't a horrific turn, but we also didn't expect to get there so quickly.
Our summer was [spent] getting our primary workflow ready for 1080p HDR, and the big retooling from here will be getting ready for 50 Hz in Beijing. But it has been tested, and we think that will be fine, so it will just be the usual maintenance on the system and replacing the stuff we decided not to touch during the Games, like latest versions of software.
The facility looks the same as it has for the past few Olympics. Can you give an overview of the core and how that has changed?
Zahas: The core is a Cisco Nexus 9K fabric with mostly Grass Valley gateway hardware. There is Grass Valley control with what is now called Orbit, and that does the orchestration. [The user controls] all of it via VSM. It's sort of a hybrid monolithic leaf/spine topology: some stuff is connected directly to the core and some on leafs. That's the gist of the core.
And, to your point, it's a good thing that it looks the same. The user sees a control panel, they punch a button, and they expect to see a source.
Donovan: We're using the same Lawo VSM router presentation layer, and Lukas has a lot of sophisticated automation and workflows built into that. When someone showed up in PyeongChang [South Korea] in 2018 and touched the router panel, things happened. Here, touching the router panel is very similar. There is some extra nomenclature to handle the HDR, and the names of the sports have changed, but it looks and feels very similar. The underpinnings are different.
That was an essential decision - to not affect operations - but also VSM was a recent investment we were quite happy with and wanted to continue. On the routing side, we were already using Grass Valley XVP cards to process SDI in and out, and now we are using XIP cards for an IP topology. A lot of the work with GV on workflows and capabilities was baked into the first project. So, while the underpinning changed, the logic didn't, and we wanted to capitalize on that in making the next big step.
OBS also underwent a lot of changes with IP, HDR, and UHD. How did that impact your operations?
Zahas: It has been straightforward because they are relying on baseband. They give us a 1080i baseband signal over fiber, and, for the UHD, they also give it to us over fiber via 12-Gbps SDI. We immediately downconvert that to 1080p HDR.
We don't have any IP handoffs between us and them. That may happen in the future, but, certainly for today, it's much easier to hand off an SDI signal and be done with it.
There is also a big facility in Stamford, CT, that this facility works closely with. How did that impact decision making?
Donovan: We were building a brand-new IBC after PeyongChang, and we had that kind of opportunity to do that. But, in the year that the Olympics got delayed, there was a lot of investment in the Stamford facility. Sure, there is a lot of 1080i there, but there was a pivot to more IP technology for routing, and more capability was built.
Callahan: The year gap turned the timetable. Initially, the plan was to get a lot of IP experience with the Tokyo facility. When it was delayed, we advanced the timeline for implementing a new GV router in Stamford with Cisco leaf/spine architecture. We started to get more mileage out of that system than the Olympic system. So, there were things we learned on the Olympic build that helped us change our design for Stamford and then lessons off the Stamford build for the Olympic build. Stamford is getting to be more 1080p-capable, with eyes toward 4K and other advanced formats that the IP router can handle going forward.
Anyone looking toward the IP and UHD and HDR world will be having the same sort of conversations you had on current vs. future needs. Any advice on how they can have those discussions?
Donovan: Well, it's a moment in time, and you try to look down the road to see where we're going to be. At NBC Olympics, the conversations are about whether an investment is for Beijing, Paris, or beyond 2024. In Stamford, it is about what level of investment to make based on b
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Live From Tokyo Olympics: Inside Look at NBC's IBC Innovation Efforts By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
