Paris 2024: As Closing Ceremony Nears, NBC Sports' Darryl Jefferson Dives Deeper Into Stamford At-Home Production Daytime coverage and primetime storytelling on TV and a robust streaming effort are a hit with fans By Jason Dachman, Editorial Director, U.S. Thursday, August 8, 2024 - 3:22 pm
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With just a few days left in the Paris 2024 festivities, NBC Sports' Olympics dual production strategy - focusing on live coverage during the day and deeper storytelling during primetime - can be officially deemed a hit with viewers. Whether it's live daytime coverage streaming on Peacock and airing on NBCU's television networks or the packaged primetime show on NBC and USA each night, the numbers have been impressive. Throw in the massive success of Gold Zone on Peacock, and the NBC Sports Group production, operations, and engineering teams will have plenty to be proud of come the Closing Ceremony on Sunday.
NBCUniversal's nightly Paris Olympics show (8-11 p.m. ET) has dominated primetime, topping 13 million viewers each night across NBC and USA Network, according to Nielsen. In addition, the show accounts for 12 of the 19 most-watched primetime shows in 2024, excluding NFL. Beginning with the Opening Ceremony, NBCUniversal has a posted 12-day Total Audience Delivery average of 32.2 million viewers across the combined live Paris Prime (2-5 p.m. ET) and U.S. primetime (8-11 p.m. ET/PT) time periods - up 77% from Tokyo (18.2 million). In addition, as of Wednesday morning, NBCUniversal's streaming of Paris 2024 - led by Peacock - has surpassed all prior Olympics combined (16.8 billion minutes total for previous Summer and Winter Games).
With just three days until the Closing Ceremony in Paris, SVG sat down with Darryl Jefferson, SVP, engineering and technology, NBC Sports and Olympics, to discuss the dual focus on daytime and primetime, how the Stamford, CT, broadcast center has evolved since the Tokyo and Beijing Games, the complicated transmission scheme connecting Paris and Stamford, NBC's Gold Zone success, and what technologies he's most excited about both for Paris and in the future.
Darryl Jefferson has been a member of NBC Sports' Olympics team for every Games since Beijing 2008.
Let's start with the basics. What has been the most exciting aspect of the Paris Games for you as we head into the closing weekend?
I think the fact that we're truly presenting these games live in a way that we've never done before is incredibly exciting, but we're also continuing to deliver on that deeper storytelling that NBC is known for at the Olympics and across all our [properties]. We're not holding anything back for primetime [as was done with] old-school television. Here, we're letting it rip during the day with tons of live sports on Peacock and our TV networks. And then the best of the best is curated and packaged for primetime on NBC, with more analysis and more behind-the-scenes [content]. Viewers seem to really be enjoying that formula.
Can you speak to how the Stamford facility has grown and evolved since the Toyko 2020 and Beijing 2022 Games?
We have built so much here in Stamford over the years, so it's pretty amazing to see how far we've come. We moved into the plant in the latter part of 2011, then took real residence in 2012 just after the London Olympics, and it has grown and grown from there. During COVID, we learned so much about how we could effectively do remote production and how we could [better utilize] resources and real estate that we already had in the building for the Olympics.
NBC Sports' Stamford, CT, broadcast center is producing the Paris 2024 Olympics.
As an example, we had a number of mobile units in our parking lot during Tokyo and Beijing to augment what we had in the building. But we've done so much construction here in the last [few years] that we actually have only one mobile unit here [for Paris 2024] despite its being significantly larger. Everything else is using internal resources that we've built, rebuilt, rethought, or reimagined [over the past two years]. Why that makes sense is that we're able to cover so many more sports concurrently because we're able to shift resources that are already in the building.
Now we can have a team onsite with local reporters or LiveU crews or similar types of things on the frontend and tcan add expert commentary or analysis or a control room to integrate the show here [in Stamford]. Also, someone can be in the same chair and pivot from one sport to the next in a remote environment. It has proved to be a really good formula for us.
How do you see these facility enhancements benefiting NBC Sports beyond the Olympics?
It's going to be a huge leg up. These are things that we can use year-round when we do other sports. We have done this all in a sustainable way so that we can do more sports and events year-round. We built things that will be able to help us do an even larger volume of content than we're already doing. That is going to serve us very well and give us a lot more bandwidth to bring on new [properties], like our [expanded] Big Ten deal, or - and I'm excited to finally publicly be able to say - bring the NBA back to NBC in 2025.
How are you bringing all the feeds from Paris into Stamford?
We have what we lovingly call the subway map, illustrating all the different services and individual video paths coming back to Stamford, and it's bigger than ever. We have a copy of the [subway map] from the Torino 2006 Games, and it looks miniature compared with this year's [transmission scheme]. That shows just how much everything has grown.
The heart of NBC Sports' Olympics broadcast operations in Stamford, CT
I would say one of the big headlines is the core [contribution network] for Tokyo was m
