Live From Paris 2024: NBC Olympics Venue Operations Shine at Aquatics, Gymnastics, and Athletics

Live From Paris 2024: NBC Olympics Venue Operations Shine at Aquatics, Gymnastics, and Athletics Dedicated unilateral resources ensure NBC Olympics can tell the best stories for fans back home By Kristian Hern ndez, Senior Editor

Wednesday, July 31, 2024 - 5:20 am

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NBC Olympics is relying heavily on the Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) world feeds for a good portion of their event coverage in Paris, but for three specific venues where Team USA is frequently seen on the podium, NBC has deployed additional resources for those competitions so it can produce its own coverage. Through their relationship with OBS, these enhancements include various unilateral cameras and onsite production facilities provided by NEP which are located in the venue compounds.

The big three - swimming, athletics, and gymnastics - are where we have our biggest presence, says Chris Connolly, VP, venue technology and engineering, NBC Olympics. [These resources] help us concentrate primetime and the best moments from that days competitions, which air live on the networks of NBC and streaming on Peacock.

At the core of the operation is a fleet of NEP trucks at the trio of venues, including NEP Caspian and Albiorix at Stade de France for athletics, which moved from the Trocad ro to the stadium after Friday evening's Opening Ceremony; NEP Venus and Mercury at Bercy Arena for gymnastics; and NEP Ceres at Paris La Defense Arena for swimming.

NBC's unilateral handhelds at the women's gymnastic final last night allowed viewers in the U.S. to fell all the emotion surrounding team USA's victory.

With their own production teams on site NBC is putting a clear focus on American athletes. The production teams are utilizing OBS camera splits to help augment their own unilateral cameras to tell a more U.S.-centric story.

In addition, NBC has a domestic mobile unit at their headquarters in Stamford, CT specifically dedicated to Daytime Live Gymnastics and later for Semi-Finals & Finals of both Men's & Women's Basketball.

Of the three venues, the most challenging production will be athletics because there are simultaneous events happening with both track and field.

The three top venues also have dedicated editing facilities for turn around show editing. Those edit facilities will allow the NBC Olympics production team to edit the morning sessions and get them ready for primetime coverage on NBC (those events will also stream live on Peacock, leveraging OBS's original world-feed production). Although NBC Olympics has this added wrinkle of tech firepower, it will still be relying heavily on OBS's world feed coverage of athletics.

The three main venues will also have dedicated and direct connectivity back to Stamford via 10Gig circuits, but NBC has a massive amount of connectivity from the IBC to Stamford in order to get other event coverage signals back to the control rooms in Stamford that is handling the other events.

We have a total of 240G of connectivity that is sending video from the IBC to our U.S.-based control room, adds Connolly. We also have a full redundant network that goes between Stanford, 30 Rock [in New York City]; Englewood Cliffs, NJ; Denver, CO and Telemundo Deportes in Miami.

Diving deeper into the technical execution of primetime, NBC Olympics is using 32 total LiveU bonded-cellular flypacks to compile ancillary content that surround any of the venues as well as other feature elements around Paris.

At most venues and around the city of Paris, our ENG crews will tap into these devices to capture the atmosphere around the stadiums or show athletes upon their arrivals before they compete and display the amazing sites of Paris continues Connolly. These will also be used in mixed-zone interview areas for the smaller competitions to send these feeds back home.

The NBC Olympics aquatics production team has been busy producing tons of swimming coverage during week one of the Olympics.

This is Connolly's first Olympics heading up venue operations as previously he oversaw the transmission side of things. He still configured the transmission puzzle for Paris, but the being involved in venue operations gives him a new appreciation of the massive undertaking it takes to produce an Olympics.

Other tentpole event like the U.S. Open, Ryder Cup, or the Super Bowl is one event where you can put all of your resources towards that one production, he says. I never realized how difficult it is to coordinate a dozen productions at one time and make sure that every single thing goes correctly.

One good bit of news for this Games is that because Paris had so many pre-existing venues (only two of the 35 venues, the 5,000-seat Aquatics Centre and Le Bourget Climbing Wall, are the only permanent venues that had to be built) Connolly and the team could visit venues earlier and make request for things like camera positions much earlier.

From a venue preparation standpoint, it was really nice to be able to get an idea of where our camera positions were going to be, continues Connolly.

It Takes an [Olympic] Village Most importantly, the planning and outlining by OBS is a major factor as to why NBC Olympics is able to upgrade these specific venues. Without their overall guidance, this layer of the production wouldn't be possible.

It's key to have the relationships that ensue that things get executed as well as know the right person to go to [for help], says Connolly. This takes a lot of effort, and I'm not sure you can ever fully explain it to anyone that's never experienced it before.

Internally, Connolly leans on the experienced staff of co-workers that have been to previous Olympic Games or have had their skills put to the test.

Ultimately, you have to trust that you're hiring the right people, he adds. I have a great gro

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