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
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
02/06/2026
Musically intelligent soft synth gets upgraded
Scaler Music will be probably be best known to many for their music theory tools, but their product range al...
02/06/2026
Powerful new vocal-production tool announced
Described as a vocal performance station , Klevgrand's latest plug-in combines pitch-correction with harmo...
02/06/2026
Launched alongside Go Green sale extension
McDSP have just released the latest addition to their APB line-up, DC-2 Dual Compressor, and have also announced ...
02/06/2026
Create custom tools for Ableton Live 12 Suite
Ableton have just introduced a new open JavaScript toolkit that allows anyone to create their own custom tools...
02/06/2026
Now features full H90 algorithm library
Eventide have announced the upcoming launch of the H9 Harmonizer Gen 2, a new and improved version of their hugely p...
02/06/2026
Plus UAD Half Yearly Sale now live
The latest arrival to the Universal Audio range delivers a new native pitch-correction plug-in that's capable of deli...
02/06/2026
Rohde & Schwarz to present comprehensive performance, conformance and spectrum-m...
02/06/2026
BTL Laboratory becomes Taiwan's first test house with a CTIA Certification c...
02/06/2026
blueCORE standalone processors headline solutions designed to simplify the trans...
02/06/2026
If you've kept up with this article series, you know by now where to start w...
02/06/2026
With new DSP configurations and flexible licensing options, Calrec is removing the barriers to virtualised audio, giving broadcasters the freedom to scale produ...
02/06/2026
The TV agency was one of the earliest adopters of Nielsen's local television...
02/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
02/06/2026
Grass Valley today announced that Australian News Channel (ANC), operator of Sky News Australia, has deployed Grass Valley AMPP to transform its newsroom produc...
02/06/2026
Studio Technologies, a leading manufacturer of high-quality audio, video, and fiber-optic solutions, announces its new Model 385 Mic/Intercom Beltpack. The Mode...
02/06/2026
The Riedel Group today announced the appointment of Gudrun Scharler as CEO of Riedel Networks. She succeeds Michael Martens, who has led Riedel Networks since 2...
02/06/2026
More signals, higher quality, and outstanding ingest and streaming flexibility deliver professional results in a small, all-in-one footprint...
02/06/2026
farmerswife will be featured on the Modena Media & Entertainment stand at this year's Mediatech Africa 2026, giving visitors an opportunity to explore the l...
02/06/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17 19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
02/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
02/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
02/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
02/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
02/06/2026
Wuppertal June 2, 2026
Gudrun Scharler Appointed CEO of Riedel Networks The Riedel Group today announced the appointment of Gudrun Scharler as CEO of Riedel N...
02/06/2026
Back to All News
Discover Your Next Book-to-Screen Obsession With Our New Dedicated Hub
Product
02 June 2026
Global
Link copied to clipboard
Dear most vor...
02/06/2026
New LinkedIn Data: 90% of C-Suite Leaders are Continuously Building Skills to Lead in the AI Era Published on Jun 2, 2026 Categories: Data and insights
Lin...
02/06/2026
Trust has become a commercial issue With global advertising spend forecast to exceed US$1 trillion this year*, the commercial consequences of weak governance co...
02/06/2026
June sees Ireland's cultural calendar in full bloom, as RT Supporting the Arts showcases a vibrant and wide-ranging programme spanning music, theatre, visu...
02/06/2026
After The Traitors Ireland launched in 2025, Irish audiences proved to have a taste for the global hit reality show. This Bank Holiday Monday fans can indulge e...
01/06/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
01/06/2026
Designed to solve a common problem in broadcasting, the automated workflow detects, identifies, removes, and documents copyrighted music
AudioShake has introdu...
01/06/2026
The sports-analytics company combines its data with proprietary AI to help leagu...
01/06/2026
Category line-up & sponsors announced
Photo: Paul Clarke
The Production Music Awards (PMA) have announced that submissions are now officially open ahead of...
01/06/2026
New hybrid sample/synthesis instrument revealed
Excite Audio have just released the latest instalment in their Evolve series, which has been developed in co...
01/06/2026
Latest TONEX expansion captures three rare vintage amps
The newest addition to IK Multimedia's ever-growing TONEX line-up introduces a set of three incr...
01/06/2026
Musically intelligent soft synth gets upgraded
Scaler Music will be probably be best known to many for their music theory tools, but their product range al...
01/06/2026
SBS confirms its broadcast sponsors for FIFA World Cup 2026
1 June, 2026
Media releases
SBS has secured Hyundai, Hisense, Macca's, Rexona, bet365, Com...
01/06/2026
Rohde & Schwarz Satellite Industry Days 2026 guided by the motto From Earth to ...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Marshall Electronics is showcasing a comprehensive lineup of next-generation POV cameras, purpose-built to power today's connected AV environments, at InfoC...
01/06/2026
Adobe Announces Concept to Vector
Deepa Subramaniam June 1, 2026
0 Comments
One of the biggest frustrations we hear from designers is how difficult it...
01/06/2026
Vampire Feature Night Patrol Graded with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton June 1, 2026
0 Comments
Colorist shapes dark, gritty tone for horror thri...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
01/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
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 
