NBC Sports Sets Its Own Record With Olympics Comms

At the Broadcast Center in Stamford, three discrete intercom systems combine into a centralized infrastructure

Into the second week of Milan Cortina 2026, eight Olympic records and one world record have been broken so far. But the athletes aren't the only ones testing limits.

This is the record-breaking stuff, says John Pastore, senior director, broadcast communications, NBC Sports, referring to the intercom infrastructure put together for NBC's production. It comprises 42 globally trunked intercom systems, using RTS's RVOC hybrid cloud-native intercom platform and RVON Voice Over Network, which allows full integration of an intercom system into an existing data network.

Essentially, three discrete intercom systems are combined into a single centralized intercom infrastructure for the entire NBC Sports Broadcast Center in Stamford, CT. It's one of the most complex comms infrastructures ever assembled at this scale and the successor to one almost as large and complex that NBC built for Paris 2024.

Two Olympics in a row now, Pastore says, proudly. The only people we're beating at this point are ourselves.

Diverse Hardware

The key, he notes, is flexibility: letting any point in the production talk to any other point easily and directly. The hardware is as diverse as can be, including mobile intercom panels running on dedicated iPhones and Android devices with Jabra headsets, totaling 127 individual setups.

The three-frame, hybrid cloud-based system is new for this Olympics; two RTS Odin intercoms in the Stamford facility tie into an AWS session and connect to a virtual Odin in the cloud hosted by AWS but serviced by RTS.

Lots of control rooms, lots of spaces, all working off centralized intercoms to a totally decentralized [system], Pastore explains, noting the estimated 23 intercoms in the Stamford plant. Every control room, every space is getting its own dedicated intercom system. Areas like a broadcast-operations center and playback are about to get their own intercom system.

Jabra developed a new headset for NBC's application. Providing passive noise isolation, versus active noise canceling, the mono headset significantly reduces the noise around the user, keeping intelligibility in the headset high but the user fully engaged with those nearby. It's powered through USB-C, which helps reduce the kind of Bluetooth pairing failure that comes with battery-powered headsets.

A Language of Its Own

NBC has developed its own taxonomy for a comms system this complex: a four-letter acronym designating users and destinations. For instance, SGPL - the S stands for sports and the G for group in all cases - covers party-line connections; SGIF is for IFB distribution; SGTI and SGTE are for internal and external comms, respectively.

Anything party-line-related that needs to leave this building or be shared with this building from outside this building hits a system called SGPL, Pastore explains. We even have an intercom called SGAR, which is for audio resource': a pre-fader listen, program audio, those kinds of things.

Trunking - a method of dynamically sharing a limited pool of frequencies among many user groups and managed by a central controller, such as a computer - is a critical way of managing a comms system this complex. Instead of dedicated, static channels, a free channel is automatically assigned for each conversation, maximizing capacity and efficiency.

There's very little that we don't do [using] trunking now, he says. It just gives us the most flexibility, the most options. For locations outside the building, we do a tremendous amount of support remotely.

Understandably, the number of people attached to Olympics comms is large. Three engineers - out of a comms crew of a dozen engineers (and at least three interns) - work 24 hours a day from different control rooms, using two different intercom panels listening to two different productions at the same time. He describes it as the biggest comms crew NBC has ever deployed for an Olympics.

John Pastore oversees Olympic comms at NBC Sports' Broadcast Center in Stamford.Making it all work is a hub-and-spoke system over Dante and ST 2110 combined with the RTS RVON platform, which Pastore says is critical for network stability in a system with a wide range of components.

Redundancy is just as important. If we have one failure, [an engineer] can always grab more [from another trunk], he explains. We don't do anything single-threaded. Everything runs through two different trunk masters to make that one location. One location comes in, splits, and comes back again. It creates some resiliency [for any] network or intercom failures.

In the Cloud

Intercoms traditionally tend to be thought of as a series of independent but interconnected endpoints. According to Pastore, the cloud is changing that. For the Olympics, NBC has deployed RTS's RVOC cloud-based systems approach. RVOC embeds intercom audio and data into existing SMPTE fiber transmission paths already in place for cameras and other devices. Audio and control data are multiplexed into unused bandwidth in the SMPTE fiber, from which RVOC extracts intercom audio at the endpoints.

Conventionally, he says, RTS's Odin intercom frames would be linked via bus expansion, a way to serially link similar components to build an extended version of that core component. Essentially, it's TDM audio (time-division multiplexing, the system mobile phones use to achieve full-duplex audio) being passed between frames. Using RVOC and interframe linking (IFL) in the cloud can create a larger version of that: a single, cohesive, and scalable intercom matrix of up to 1,024 ports.

That's where RTS came in with RVOC and changed up the game for us, says Pastore. That was the first time we could start envisioni

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/02/18/nbc-sports-sets-its-own-record-...
	See more stories from svg

Most recent headlines