Harmonic Products Support Sochi Olympics Coverage

NEW YORK Harmonic is supplying both its MediaGrid shared storage system and Spectrum MediaDeck integrated media playout server products to NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group. The equipment will be used in the production of the upcoming 2014 Olympic Winter Games taking place in Sochi, Russia. The network will be using the Harmonic systems to support a highlights factory with a Stamford, Conn. staff accessing events and creating highlights clips for PCs and mobile devices.

Over the past three Olympic Games, Harmonic infrastructure has been at the center of the NBC Olympics production workflow, said Peter Alexander, Harmonic's chief marketing officer. In 2014 Harmonic media server and storage systems will once again play a critical role in NBC Olympics content creation workflow, providing the performance and reliability essential to timely multiplatform delivery of compelling content--an increasingly important element of high-profile sports coverage.

In referring to the Stamford highlight's production facility, David Mazza, NBC Olympics senior vice president, termed it a game changer.

Everything we built for the 2012 London Olympics is being used here in Stamford every day by NBC Sports and NBC Sports Network, said Mazza. Throughout the 2014 Sochi Olympics, we will be able to leverage both new and existing infrastructure to establish a highly efficient and very cost-effective fast-turnaround highlights-creation workflow for multiplatform content.

The Stamford highlights factory will be recording as many as 25 incoming venue feeds in both XDCAM-HD 50 Mbps and H.264 low-resolution proxy versions. The Harmonic systems will give operators there independent control of more than 60 channels of local ingest. The 480 TB MediaGrid system there is connected to a 384 TB MediaGrid in Sochi via two 10-Gbps circuits that will allow everything on the Russian sever to be replicated in Connecticut in less than a minute. Once the content is received, Stamford loggers, producers and editors will create the highlight files. An LTO-5 library has also been installed at the Stamford facility to provide quick access to recorded content from previous Olympic Games.

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