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the EVS rooms and the edit systems in Stamford were running at 50 Hz. Conversion to 60 Hz was generally done at the very end of production. “That saved us a lot of


conversion,” said Mazza. “For example, curling has six or seven feeds going from Sochi to the curling control room in Stamford at 50 Hz, and it had two converters on its output, and as a backup. So that saved five converters, just in that one instance.”


The NBC Olympics Broadcast Operations Center (BOC)


It also helped out during the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, in which 30 Rock (not set up for 50 Hz) took a backup feed that had passed through Stamford for conversion. Stamford is very well connected to both the NOC in New Jersey, and 30 Rock. “It’s now a place where we can send our own material and do things to it, and then send it off to another NBC entity,” said Mazza. “We’ve kind of ‘normalized’ it in Stamford.”


NO LONGER ‘NEW MEDIA’ One curious change between London and Sochi was the name change of the ‘New Media’ component of the effort to ‘Digital,’ in NBC communications.


Korea will host the next Winter Olympics


database EDLs and clips to the MAM, they’re also pushing to key venues,” said Darryl Jefferson, vice president of Digital Workflow for NBC Olympics. Sochi saw NBC taking a leap


of faith. “For the past year we’re operating this way in Stamford, and we realized it was possible to run this way for the Olympics as well,” said Matt Green, senior digital media engineer for NBC Sports Group and NBC Olympics. “In London we left ourselves a safety net by building off Sony’s XDCAM [optical disc] stations. If we lost automation, if we lost asset management, if we lost central storage, we could put everything on optical discs as we had done in Vancouver and Beijing.”


Although the entire system continues to be based on Sony’s Long GOP 50 recording format, not having handheld media in a production process can be a hurdle for some users. But as adoption rates exceeded expectations, the benefits became obvious to end users, according to Jefferson. “The thing that’s remarkable to us as stewards and watchers of the project is that as soon as people


can access the entire library, there’s really no way to put that genie back in the bottle,” he said. “Even though we turned the MAM on to the broadcast clients for the first time in London, this is the first time it reached out to enough places that you really saw the impact on the organization,” said Mazza. “The venues, New York City, Florida, Telemundo... they were all connected. So I would say this is really where the MAM sort of went mainstream, front and centre.”


SPLIT PRODUCTION & MORE Pushing the MAM to key venues was a big difference from London to Sochi. Another key difference was the heavy use of the NBC Sports facility in Stamford, which became operational several months after the London Olympics, but a full year before Sochi. Although the facility houses


numerous NBC Sports divisions, it was designed with Olympics in mind. A substantial part of the facility can switch back and forth between 50 and 60 Hz reference and three of the control rooms and two-thirds of


April 2014 I TV Technology Asia-Pacific 13////////////////


For the first time at an


Olympics, NBC produced a substantial amount of content (more than 100 hours) solely for digital consumption. In the past, New Media/digital outlets used primarily the host feed, and then the host multichannel distribution service (MDS) channels off satellite, which had host English-language announcers. Sochi saw the debut of


studio shows for exclusive digital use, including the Gold Zone, a full studio show from Stamford, which resembled an NFL “Red Zone” program throughout the day with all the top news. “Olympic Ice,” presented behind-the-scenes material about skating that aired online before primetime, and a 2–3 minute update from the news desk also streamed online several times daily. Although New Media/digital


gets lots of headlines and attention, broadcast continues to produce an order of magnitude more viewership. Considering the time zone, broadcast ratings were good, with NBC winning 18 of 18 nights in 2014, compared to 14 of 17 in Vancouver in 2010 and 9 of 17 in Torino in 2006. ///


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