Stamford Spotlight, Part : Inside NBC Olympics Largest At-Home Production Ever

This is Part One of SVG's four-part series on NBC Olympics' at-home operation in Stamford, CT. Make sure to check out Part 2, a look at the studios and control rooms; Part 3, on the Streaming Factory setup; and Part 4, on the Off-Tube Factory commentary operation.

The Rio 2016 Games mark NBC Olympics' largest at-home operation to date, with more than 1,100 people supporting the production from its Sports Production Operations Center (SPOC) in Stamford, CT. Although the Peacock used an at-home production model at 30 Rock in New York for the 2008 Beijing and 2012 London Olympics (and, to lesser extent, for the 1996 Atlanta Games), the Rio 2016 operation is roughly 50% larger than those 30 Rock efforts and is the first based in NBC Sports' state-of-the-art Stamford, CT, facility, which opened in summer 2013.

NBC Olympics' (from left) Tim Canary, Ken Goss, and Tom Popple inside NBCSN's PC4

I think what the team has built here is truly a sustainable model for future Olympics to go on through 2032, says Tim Canary, VP, engineering. A big part of all this is projecting what the needs will be in the future and trying to get ahead of it, because you can't just put technology in overnight and then rely on it for the Olympics. But we're pretty good at projecting and communicating what we need to do. But, honestly, it's all about the team here: they've done a masterful job in taking what they normally do day to day and expanding it to an Olympic setting.

Located nearly 5,000 miles from NBC's operation at the International Broadcast Center (IBC) in Rio de Janeiro, the SPOC houses seven control rooms and NEP's NCPII mobile unit parked at the truck bay, five studios, more than 40 edit rooms, three Avid Pro Tools audio suites, the Broadcast Operations Center (BOC), and Transmission, along with the Highlights Factory, Streaming Factory, and Off Tube Factory (featuring 18 announce booths).

It's just been an ultimate team effort, and you need that with a project of this size, says Ken Goss, SVP, remote operations and production planning. [NBC Olympics SVP/CTO] Dave Mazza and Tim [Canary] continue to look at the most efficient workflows, and that's the key: leveraging what we have built here and creating a better Olympics product. These guys have been working for the last two years, so why not take advantage of the amazing campus that they have built here.

Central Ingest at the Center of It All

As the main recording area where OBS host and NBC feeds are recorded and logged for later commentary, editing, and playback, Central Ingest is at the core of every piece of content produced by NBC Olympics for every platform. It serves as the content hub for NBC's massive Stamford operation, a corresponding Central Ingest area is located at the IBC in Rio, and both locations can see the other's ingests at all times.

Central Ingest is located inside a long hall at the SPOC.

The is very different from the London and Beijing Games we ran from 30 Rock, says Coordinating Producer Karre Numme, who oversees NBC's entire at-home effort. This time, most of the content is live, whereas, in the past, it was all mostly on tape. We do have a ton of live [content] for this Olympics, but roughly 40% of our sports are going to be on tape. So it's definitely a different vibe.

At the core of Central Ingest is a command station where production supervisors select feeds from Rio to be ingested, allot an ingest fiber path for each, and monitor the feeds to ensure that they are fed to proper Off Tube announce booths for commentary. Feeds begin coming in around 7 a.m. ET each day and continue through midnight, making Central Ingest a nearly round-the-clock operation.

We are much more on our toes because there is so much live [content] this year and live sports can obviously end early or go long, says Numme. We're adjusting our schedule throughout the course of the day with more or less taped content to bridge those gaps. It's a constant juggling act all day.

The rack room inside the Stamford Broadcast Operations Center (Photo by: Virginia Sherwood/NBC)

As was the case for the 2014 Sochi Games, the majority of NBC Olympics' loggers are located in Stamford. These operators are responsible for inputting logging information to the media-asset-management (MAM) system, which allows searches of the recorded material. Each log executed in Stamford is immediately visible to users in both Rio and Stamford.

Says Numme, We have this long row of workstations with two people working together: a logger working on sport and an AD working with the sport producer in the announce booth to create segment sheets and take in the segments, making sure everything is good from an audio and visual standpoint.

In the back of Central Ingest is a series of EVS playout rooms outfitted with EVS XT3 servers, which supply playback elements to the respective control rooms in Stamford. The Central Ingest area also features nine Avid Media Composer edit suites, which handle segments that require extensive postproduction work.

[For Beijing and London] we didn't have any Avid [edit suites]; we were doing everything off of EVS, Numme points out. That has been a big [enhancement] for segments that need to be highly touched up. Weightlifting, for example, is not as easy to call from start to finish as a handball match would be.

Comms Go IP With Dante, RTS OMNEO

NBC's comms infrastructure for the Rio Games has been largely revamped from previous Games, with NBC transitioning from 99% analog audio to 99% digital audio with almost no analog audio for comms.

Inside the comms room in Stamford

Most notable at both Stamford and the Rio IBC are increased use of MADI digital audio, the addition of RTS OMNEO IP networking architecture (using Dante for med

LINK:	http://www.sportsvideo.org/2016/08/19/stamford-spotlight-part-1-inside...
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