After years of experimentation, NBC has created a winning workflow that it will use as a template for future Games and a huge new sports facility. Location report by David Fox
NBC HAD a huge presence in London for the Olympics, taking up more space in the International Broadcast Centre than OBS and the BBC combined. It had some 2,800 people in London plus 700 in New York working on the Games. “It’s a pretty enormous effort to go from about 100 to 120 year- round employees,” said NBC’s Director of Post Production Operations, Darryl Jefferson. To make this work, it had to
rely on a transatlantic workflow it has perfected over numerous Games. This will form the basis of its new sports facility in Stamford, Connecticut due on air early next year. Jefferson believes that the way the Blueorder (now Avid) MAM system has developed has “been a significant game changer. We can move files from London to New York, Telemundo in Florida, Comcast in Denver, and all business units can essentially self-service their content needs. Whether it’s on EVS or a deck in New York, you can move it with a click and a drag.” Previously, “we had to re-build
and re-think every time we built a content factory for each Games, but this will become our system for Stamford and our workflow for future Games.”
Daryl Jefferson:
Matt Adams: “Can you think of a worse place to test all your new equipment than the Olympics!”
“This is the first Olympics that NBC has aggressively used Internet Protocol infrastructure. All the delivery is IP, as is content creation” Matt Adams, Harmonic
About one-third of the equipment it assembled for London will move on to Sochi for the 2014 Winter Olympics, another third will be used in Stamford, and the rest returned to vendors or hire companies. “We are re-using much more stuff than ever before,” he said. “During previous Olympics we were developing file-based
workflows, but now people are comfortable using the tools,” said Matt Adams, VP, Solutions Architecture, Harmonic, who worked for NBC Olympics from 1996 to 2006 (and has been part of the team at each Olympics since). “Each one we were tasked with making more content, more efficiently. We would test at each Olympics new ideas of how this
might work, including leaving people at home and electronically hooking them up with the content.” For 2008 NBC’s experimental
workflow saw content ingested in Beijing, Omneon equipment making high-res and proxy copies of each source, and about 50 operators in New York doing selection and sending it to Avid or creating a simple cut piece.
The new workflow allows NBC’s business units to “self-service their content needs”
For 2010, it tried a version of
that in Vancouver with an EVS workflow, but no proxies. All high-res content was stored on Media Grids and the operators were in the IBC.
By London, the Blueorder system NBC used first at Beijing had become part of Avid, integrated with Interplay. It was used with a large Media Grid streaming content locally, with about 50 users across news and sports at the IBC. There were also six STM-16 2.4Gbps data pipes (about 2Gbps each after overheads) to New York, where