Paris 2024: Inside NBCUniversal's Digital Network Operations Center Where Streaming Has Soared to Record Highs

Paris 2024: Inside NBCUniversal's Digital Network Operations Center Where Streaming Has Soared to Record Highs NBCUniversals Dana Oliver: It is not for the faint of heart. By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital

Friday, August 9, 2024 - 1:48 pm

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The clock ticked innocently to 9:34 a.m. ET on August 8. Just another moment on a Wednesday morning in the two-week marathon-that's-also-a-sprint that is the Olympics. Except it wasn't.

NBCUniversal's Digital Network Operations Center (DNOC) located in the NBC Sports' Stamford headquarters is the technical home of NBCUniversal's Paris Olympics streaming operations.

In the far corners of NBC Sports' Stamford, CT-based headquarters, the Digital Network Operations Center (DNOC) is pumping out a seemingly infinite amount of live content to NBC's streaming service, Peacock. One could imagine a scoreboard there, ringing like a slot machine on a heater paying out a jackpot in the Vegas Strip. It was at that moment that NBCUniversal's streaming of the Paris Olympics - led by Peacock - hit 16.8 billion (with a b) minutes streamed for these Paris Games. There were still five whole days of the Olympics to go and the media giant had just surpassed the number of minutes streamed at every other Summer and Winter Olympics it had streamed in its history combined.

It's been well documented how these Paris Games have been a welcome return to form for the Olympics as a entertainment product in the United States. With most events happening during the daytime hours here in the States, its been perfectly suited for streaming audiences; and the team behind Peacock has capitalized. Full live events. Multiviews. The wildly-popular GoldZone wraparound studio show. It's been a banner effort for Peacock and American viewers have gobbled it up in heaping portions.

For us, it's all in the preparation, says Dana Oliver, SVP of Global Streaming Operations for NBCUniversal. In advance of the Games, we spend a significant amount of time doing a review of our workflows to adjust based on learnings from previous live events. We've built up and scaled our production technology, and we partner closely with NBC Sports to onboard all the content and prepare it for distribution. We also conduct several months of rehearsals and testing to plan for a variety of scenarios that may impact how we deliver content to customers, so that we're ready for anything.

We worked tirelessly to make the experience for our customers look magical and flawless. Dana Oliver, SVP of Global Streaming Operations, NBCUniversal

The scale of the Olympics is, not surprisingly, staggering. Take just the first week for example: Peacock managed up to 60 concurrent single live event streams and up to 300 live events a day. That's a total of over 1,800 single live events in that time frame.

The backbone (nervous system? Whichever comp you wish to pull from Gray's Anatomy) of it all is the Stamford-based NBCU DNOC. The technical nucleus of the media organzation's streaming operations has been responsible for supporting and optimizing the experience for users around the clock. That includes everything from monitoring and adjusting infrastructure to ensure customers are seeing the best possible quality streams for on-demand and live content, driving the distribution and support of live events to internal and external partners and platforms, and creating a seamless digital ad-insertion process for advertisers.

Peacock has been the #1 app on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store during the Olympics.

According to Oliver, there are several dozens of people on the DNOC team, ranging from front line operators with varying levels of expertise, to control room engineers. The team scales up even more during the Olympics to manage all the content coming to the platform. On a average Olympic day, the DNOC works in partnership with the NBC Olympics Programming and Editorial teams and Olympic Broadcasting Services to receive live streams and encode those live events onto Peacock and NBCUniversal's TV Everywhere platforms. Once the content is on platform, the DNOC is then responsible for ensuring an optimal customer video experience while also inserting ads, creating replays, and monitoring the health of the eligible device set.

The consumer experience of Peacock, in particular, has enjoyed rave reviews during these Games. NBC debuted several new features in advance of Paris, including personalized daily recaps, multiview (which NBC Sports reps say is being used by nearly of quarter of the Peacock audience), interactive schedules, and chaptering within individual lives events.

I am extremely proud of what our team has been able to accomplish up to and during the Games, says Oliver. It is not for the faint of heart. The team's performance throughout the Games was best-in-class, and we worked tirelessly to make the experience for our customers look magical and flawless. It's not an easy task, and the positive response from customers has been so rewarding to see.

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2024/08/09/paris-2024-inside-nbcuniversals...
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