Paris 2024: NBC Olympics Technical Efforts Will Be Four Times Larger Than the Tokyo 2020 Games' A team of 3,000 will deliver content to U.S. viewers; Peacock will be major content hub for 329 events By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director
Tuesday, July 9, 2024 - 9:18 am
Print This Story
With less than three weeks until the start of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, the production team at NBC Olympics is hard at work on both sides of the Atlantic, getting operations and workflows nailed down. With approximately 3,000 people set to work on delivering 329 events via NBC, Peacock, Telemundo, and related cable networks, the team is applying the finishing touches.
Here is a preview of NBC's plans (and a hint to some of the stories we here at SVG will be diving into when we head to Paris).
In terms of scale, NBC Olympics says the technical transformation from the Tokyo Games has been massive, quadrupling in size. And, although the broadcaster will have a smaller presence at the IBC, the effort at its Stamford, CT, facility will be larger, and it will have eight studio locations throughout Paris.
An Opening Ceremony Unlike Any Other The Olympics Opening Ceremony always makes a big splash, but this year that splash is literal: the parade of athletes will take place on 92 boats floating down the Seine. More than 10,000 athletes, dancers, and even a few international musical acts will be involved. It could easily be the largest televised event in history, with OBS (Olympic Broadcast Services) deploying more than 100 cameras to create the world feed and NBC Olympics adding in 45 of its unilateral cameras. Jibs, cranes, cable cams, eight drones, three helicopters, and four boats with stabilized cameras and jibs are in the OBS mix, and 200 camera phones will be deployed to cover the country teams during the parade. All told, the full camera complement from all entities is expected to near 1,000.
NBC Olympics in Paris The IBC will be at the 80,000-sq.-meter Paris Le Bourget Exhibition Centre. NBC's presence will be smaller than in previous years, housing camera shading, two announce booths, and a midsize studio that will be at the center of Peacock programming. The focus there will be on gathering signals and ensuring that they are normalized and corrected before being sent to Stamford, where control rooms, record wall, edit rooms, playback, and graphics will be housed. The production format of choice is 1080p HDR at 50 Hz with 10 channels of Dolby Atmos. In addition, the entire operation will rely on SMPTE ST 2110 for video and Dante for audio.
The eight studio locations, meanwhile, will be spread across Paris, bringing the City of Lights to viewers in the U.S. The most important, Studio A, on the Place du Trocad ro overlooking the Eiffel Tower, will be home to Mike Tirico for part of the daytime show. The full 360-degree shooting environment will feature wrought-iron gates and multiple locations for interviews, highlights, and standups. Studio B, meanwhile, will be home to the Today show.
Both studios will have four pedestal cameras, a Steadicam, and a Technocrane, and Studio A will also have a cable cam running to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
NBC is leaning into TikTok with a set at the Team USA house, which is at the Palais Brongniart. Most nights during the Games, a live TikTok show in front of an audience will likely air from the Palais.
Telemundo will have its own studio location, overlooking the Arc de Triomphe (a location it will share with NBC Evening News).
Of course, studio locations are only part of the plan for Paris 2024, and NBC Olympics will have a big ENG presence across the city. Five ENG crews will capture footage and interviews with athletes' families and more, with the elements pulled together for air in Control Room C in Stamford. In addition, nine NBC Sports crews will be capturing content for the nightly Olympic Zone on NBC as well as covering breaking news from the various mixed zones.
At the venues, NBC Olympics will have different levels of production. The big three - athletics, gymnastics, and swimming - will have the most dedicated resources, including mobile units, allowing NBC to enhance the OBS production. Production trucks will be onsite at Stade de France, which will host athletics; Bercy Arena, home to gymnastics; and Paris La Defense Arena, the swimming events. Each venue will also have an instrumented jib camera to enable larger-than-life graphics and - with the help of SMT, Piero, Fingerworks, and Dartfish - plenty of virtual graphics and analysis.
NBC Olympics will also have a unilateral presence for diving, golf, beach and indoor volleyball, tennis, wrestling, the urban sports, the outside races, basketball prelims, and soccer.
To enhance coverage, multiple venues will have 360 3D replay capabilities and cinematic cameras.
Meanwhile, the Stateside Effort Is Larger Than Ever The Stamford facility will be very much at the center of NBC Olympics efforts. Twelve control rooms will be dedicated to Paris 2024 (there will be only one truck at the loading dock). NBC Stamford will also fire up Riedel Simplylive rooms, where content creation will be enhanced for a wide range of production needs. In addition, 28 off-tube announce booths offer three levels of capabilities: eight booths are enhanced, featuring a producer who handles graphics creation and insertion; four super booths provide telestration capabilities as well as remotely controlled cameras, allowing talent to appear on screen.
Also at Stamford, a tape facility will operate 24 hours a day. EVS and Avid editing stations (five dedicated to cutting events down) and media-management operations will be overseen by a team of more than 60 operators and 40 production staffers, including more than 20 turnaround producers. They will work closely with the venue producers and announce
Most recent headlines
11/12/2025
Dalet, a leading provider of cloud-native, end-to-end media workflow solutions, ...
20/11/2025
CINCINNATI Oklahoma Community Television (OCT) has selected GatesAir and Triveni Digital as key technology partners in an ATSC 3.0 deployment that establishes a...
20/11/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has opened a wide-ranging inquiry into the relations between broadcast networks and their affiliates that could...
20/11/2025
NEW YORK Ad spend in the creator economy has more than doubled since 2021 from $13.9B to $29.5B in 2024 and that amount is projected to reach $37 billion in 202...
20/11/2025
Graduate Spotlight: Krysta Mirsik DePuy The educator from Hackettstown, New Jersey, shares how it took her 11 years to find the right graduate program for her...
20/11/2025
LONDON The winners of the Rise Awards 2025, which recognize women and companies whose achievements have stood out in the media technology industry, have been an...
20/11/2025
SANTA MONICA & NEW YORK Lionsgate's Worldwide Television Distribution Group and Debmar-Mercury have launched MovieSphere Gold in more than 30 million homes....
20/11/2025
ALAMEDA, Calif. Clear-Com has introduced its four-channel HelixNet beltpack, a next-generation advancement of its widely used two-channel model, and anticipates...
20/11/2025
NEW PROVIDENCE, N.J. Streaming technology and services provider Kiswe has launched Kiswe Core, a next-generation cloud-based platform designed to simplify the s...
20/11/2025
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. Dolby Laboratories has signed on as an official signature partner of the Bay Area Host Committee (BAHC) for the 2026 Super Bowl and the we...
20/11/2025
STUTTGART, Germany 3 Screen Solutions (3SS) has announced that the Canadian multiservice operator Telus has launched its Telus TV+ entertainment platform on Sam...
20/11/2025
Major League Baseball has announced deals with ESPN, NBCUniversal and Netflix covering 2026-2028 that make ESPN the exclusive distributor for MLB.TV, put regula...
20/11/2025
Berklee Presents Holiday Extravaganza: Duke Ellingtons The Nutcracker Suite and ...
20/11/2025
It's the Late Late Toy Show BIG BIG Ticket Giveaway day!
It's the Late ...
20/11/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on how developers, 3D practitioners and enterprises can transform their workflows u...
20/11/2025
The How To Gael pocast gals, comedian Chris Kent and quizzer Darragh Ennis drop by for the fifth episode of The 2 Johnnies Late Night Lock In
In the penultimat...
20/11/2025
Tonight on RT Prime Time, Marie Crowe on how a Reading School changed her son&#...
20/11/2025
The NVIDIA Blackwell RTX upgrade is nearing the finish line, letting GeForce NOW Ultimate members across the globe experience true next-generation cloud gaming ...
20/11/2025
Tanya Berger-Wolf's first computational biology project started as a bet wit...
19/11/2025
Sphere Sound Kicks Up Its Heels at Radio City Music HallUltra-immersive system from the singular Las Vegas venue is also ready for sportsBy Dan Daley, Audio Edi...
19/11/2025
The Future of Stadium and Arena Video Control Rooms: Tech Leaders Talk 4K, IP, a...
19/11/2025
One Year at Intuit Dome: Walking Through the Stunning Arena's Advanced Video...
19/11/2025
SVG Sit-Down: IMG's Francois Westcombe Goes Inside IMG's Annual Digital ...
19/11/2025
Inside Brighton & Hove Albion's fan-first media machine By George Bevir
Tuesday, November 18, 2025 - 10:10
Print This Story
Brighton & Hove Albion'...
19/11/2025
Rock Chalk Rebuild, Part 1: Kansas Athletics Brings New Production Power to Rebu...
19/11/2025
Rock Chalk Rebuild, Part 2: A Pro's Guide to Kansas Athletics' New Video...
19/11/2025
MLB Media Rights Shakeup: NBC Inks Three-Year Deal for Sunday Night Baseball, Pe...
19/11/2025
Rohan Parashuram Kanawade attends the premiere of Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival at Egyptian Theatre on January 26, 2025, in Pa...
19/11/2025
Awards season is heating up, and the International Documentary Association just ...
19/11/2025
Aerojet Rocketdyne President Ken Bedingfield and Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders were joined by state and local officials to celebrate the groundbreaking o...
19/11/2025
L3Harris and PentenAmio formalise their teaming agreement at MilCIS 2025, streng...
19/11/2025
Calrec gives Phoenix Broadcast Solutions its full support in strategic multi-year enterprise partnership New Singapore OB company invests in Calrec technology f...
19/11/2025
October brings a larger audience in front of TV screens. The cooler autumn weather and the continuation of new programming schedules brought increases in both t...
19/11/2025
IRVING, Texas Nexstar Media Group and Tegna filed applications on Nov. 18 with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seeking its consent to transfer broad...
19/11/2025
Vitec has acquired Datapath, a developer of real-time video processing for large-scale video walls, AVoIP content distribution and KVM control in mission-critic...
19/11/2025
NEVADA CITY, Calif. Telestream has introduced ARGUS Version 2.3, which introduces Live Look, a feature that lets operators inspect live and on-demand streams vi...
19/11/2025
STAMFORD, Conn. and NEW YORK Charter Communications, Inc. has announced a major deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that establishes AWS as one of Charters stra...
19/11/2025
TOKYO Atomos has announced a major firmware update that brings integrated camera control to the Ninja TX GO and Ninja TX its new CFexpress-based monitor-recor...
19/11/2025
Berklee's Signature Series Reimagines the Musical and Visual Artistry of Col...
19/11/2025
PlayBox Neo departed the NAB Show New York 2025 on a high note. The company's all-new PlayBox Neo Suite made a splash on the show floor, drawing strong inte...
19/11/2025
AAVBR (American Audio Visual Baton Rouge), a leading full-service event production company serving Louisiana and the Gulf Coast region, has enhanced its product...
19/11/2025
In its mission to deliver live event services combining advanced engineering with a creative approach to captivating live sports and entertainment experiences, ...
19/11/2025
NEW YORK Short-form vertical video has exploded across platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, but a new survey commissioned by Media.net, a provider of c...
19/11/2025
NEW YORK YES Network, the regional sports network home of the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Nets, and CAMB.AI have struck a partnership they said will leverage ...
19/11/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has issued detailed guidance on filings that were disrupted by the government shutdown. While many of those fil...
19/11/2025
NEW YORK The popularity of NFL games is largely responsible for continued seasonal momentum in TV viewership into October (measured Sept. 29-Oct. 26), according...
19/11/2025
DirecTV has announced that its MyFree DirecTV streaming service has added seven new channels. Those include four sports services, NBA FAST, Red Bull TV, DAZN Ri...
19/11/2025
SURREY, U.K. Mark Roberts Motion Control (MRMC) has launched Flair Bridge, a compact device that transforms how operators control the company's motion-contr...
19/11/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission, which is continuing to rapidly ramp up its operations after the end of the federal government shutdown, has se...
Paris 2024: NBC Olympics Technical Efforts Will Be Four Times Larger Than the Tokyo 2020 Games' A team of 3,000 will deliver content to U.S. viewers; Peacock will be major content hub for 329 events By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director 
