Live From PyeongChang: NBC's Dave Mazza, Team Ready To Go Tons of live programming, UHD HDR are on tap for viewers across the U.S. By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Wednesday, February 7, 2018 - 3:20 am
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The 2018 Winter Olympics from PyeongChang, South Korea, will be under way in less than 24 hours, and, for Dave Mazza, SVP/CTO, NBC Sports Group and NBC Olympics, launch preparations have gone smoothly so far.
Dave Mazza of NBC Sports and NBC Olympics says prep for this year's Games has gone very well.
Things are going really well, and it has been a good setup, better than the past three or four Games, says Mazza. Our team has been awesome, and, while we had a few snags with people getting sick, fortunately, everyone is doing well now.
He credits a few things for NBC's being ahead of where it usually is at this stage of preparation. Olympics Broadcast Services (OBS) and the PyeongChang Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (POCOG) took construction of the International Broadcast Center (IBC), venues, and facilities to a new level of readiness, especially compared with recent Games. The 2016 and 2014 Olympics in Rio and Sochi, respectively, were plagued with construction delays, equipment shortages for things like outlets and power, transportation issues, and more. That is not the case in PyeongChang.
The Koreans understand technology. They also do a nice job with construction, says Mazza. And they don't do anything halfway. At times, we had to tell them, Hey, guys, this is just a temporary setup' while they were welding something that was designed to last forever.
This is also the second Games for which OBS broke down the previous IBC building, packed it into more than 300 shipping containers, and rebuilt it for the next Olympics.
The NBC Olympics broadcast operations center is gearing up for 18 days of Olympic coverage.
All of the panels, columns, and electrical systems were up when we got here. It was a godsend because it took all of the variables out of the equation, says Mazza. Our space was clean, ready to run cables, and the power was good. And, so far, the telco connections have been without incident. Both OBS and the KOBOC have done an excellent job of getting everything ready.
While OBS and the South Koreans were busy getting the venues and IBC ready to go, the NBC Olympics team in Stamford, CT, spent months making sure the IBC systems were tested and retested to ensure that they would be ready for the massive workload of the next three weeks.
We did a much better job of prefabricating and preconfiguring everything in Stamford, says Mazza.
For example, the media-asset-management (MAM) system in PyeongChang was configured in Stamford, a floor below the system that it is now connected to. That gave the NBC Olympics MAM team, as well as vendors and freelancers, a chance to test the system and make sure it was running properly before it was packed up and shipped to PyeongChang.
Avid also wrote some bots to simulate hundreds, if not thousands, of users and keystrokes to test the load that was a problem in Rio, says Mazza. And we had a WAN simulator to test latency.
NBC also brought in some of the members of the freelance team that would use the system in PyeongChang to work with it in Stamford. The result was a team that was able to hit the ground running on arrival in PyeongChang.
By the end of December, the NBC Olympics technical team was about two weeks ahead of where it has usually been in terms of readiness. In fact, the main drain on people was not the strain of getting ready for the Olympics but, instead, being in South Korea during a tense time geopolitically.
Even though we have learned to keep our heads down and get the job done, we haven't been anywhere where there are actual threats of an all-out war from both sides, Mazza points out. We have dealt with Zika, security problems in Russia, and terrorist threats, but not a threat of war. Having said that, PyeongChang feels like an incredibly safe place.
In terms of technical and production changes, the team has made a lot of changes on the venue side of operations and a bunch of small tweaks to the IBC operations.
On the venue side, we took what we have been doing with the at-home efforts in the States and applied it to the venues, Mazza explains. So we are doing some significant at-home productions in the IBC and also back in the States.
For example, the NBC Sports Network studio at the Coastal Cluster venue is now being controlled from Control Room 4 in Stamford. It's running 23 hours a day, with 16 hours of production originating from the studio at the Coastal Cluster and seven hours from a studio in Stamford.
Also, the jumping venue, which used to be done from a flypack, is now using an AT&T Media Links kit to move eight feeds from the venue to here at the IBC, where it will be produced from Control Room X, says Mazza. Control Room X made its debut in Rio and was used to remotely produce women's basketball games.
NBC's NEWBERT flypack will also be in use for both hockey coverage from the smaller hockey arena and the Closing Ceremony. The NEWBERT system is contained in six flight cases and includes a good-size Evertz EMR 64 router. The flypack also houses a Lawo-based audio core, a small intercom system, and an EVS replay unit. An AT&T Media Links frame will send 36 feeds to Control Room X for the Closing Ceremony through a 10-Gbps link.
The Alpine events will also make use of some remote connectivity. The core NBC production-truck facilities, provided by Game Creek Video, will be located at the speed hill and connected to an eight-camera flypack and a routing switcher located at the technical-skiing venue, where the slalom events are held. Located an hour apart, the production team at the speed hill will be
