Stateside Olympics Effort Deploys Army of Studios, Control Rooms, Trucks, 'Family & Friends' Unit

TOKYO OLYMPIC GAMES: NBC

Stateside Olympics Effort Deploys Army of Studios, Control Rooms, Trucks, ‘Family & Friends’ Unit

NBC Sports went all out for its coverage of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics overseas, but, for this large-scale effort, the stateside team in Stamford, CT, pitched in with plenty of resources. Stamford played its largest role in an Olympics production to date: the two-week event called for five simultaneous studios and control rooms, four mobile units at the truck dock, and the largest iteration ever of NBC’s Off-Tube Factory remote commentary operation.

“Technologically, I think we’re stretching the boundaries,” said Tim Canary, VP, engineering, NBC Sports Group, during the Games. “It’s truly a technological marvel how we’ve able to do all this, considering all the challenges of the past year and a half.”

One of the biggest complements in NBC’s Olympics coverage, the number of studio shows was staggering. Whereas the sets in Tokyo were designed for virtualization, such as augmented reality and virtual reality, the sets in Stamford were based on versatility. The profusion of Olympic events called for ample studio presence, and, with a 13-hour time difference, the broadcaster deployed all available spaces in a variety of sizes.

The schedule began in Stamford at 6 p.m. ET on USA with host Kathryn Tappen, Director Jennifer Morrison, and Producer Matt Casey from the Odaiba TV Tower in Tokyo. They were followed by host Ahmed Fareed, Director Mike Torello, and Producer Aaron Bearden at 2 a.m. on USA in Studio 3. Seven hours later, Liam McHugh took over

The main Off-Tube Factory in Stamford

at 10 a.m. on USA in Studio 2 with Director Ray Herbert and Producer Brett Castelluccio. McHugh remained in Studio 2 from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. for coverage on NBCSN with Producer Paige Shepperly. Wrapping up the broadcaster’s linear coverage in Stamford, Golf Channel’s Live From provided a prematch show from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. and a postmatch show from 3 a.m. to 4 a.m. Located in Studio 1, Anna Whitley worked alongside Coordinating Producers Ben Daughan and Matt Hegarty, Producers Alan Robison and Arthur Volpe, and Directors Will Siegrist and Mark Mosback, while Todd Lewis offered commentary from Tokyo.

On the digital side, Rich Eisen headlined Tokyo Gold from 11 a.m. to noon in Studio 6 on Peacock with Producer Dan Steir and Director Patrick McManus. Studio 3 was in use for Tokyo Tonight, with hosts Kenny Mayne, Cari Champion, and Jac Collinsworth conducting interviews. This show on Peacock, running from 7:30 p.m. to midnight Monday through Saturday and 6:30 p.m. to midnight Sunday, was handled by Producers Alexa Maremaa and Adam Littlefield and Director Susan King. Studio 1 is on the air for On Her Turf on Peacock from 7 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. and for hits on Twitter. On Her Turf was continued on page 42

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TOKYO OLYMPIC GAMES: NBC

Extra Year of Prep Boosts NBC Olympics’ At-Home Operation

Since launching in 2013, NBC’s Sports Production

Operations Center (SPOC) in Stamford, CT, has used each Olympic Games as an opportunity to take a substantial technological leap forward. With the pandemicmandated extra 12 months of preparation for this year’s Tokyo Games, NBC’s Stamford engineering team kicked its innovation efforts into hyperdrive.

“Of course, we always take a big step forward from one Olympics to the next, but [the delay] accelerated a lot of things that we already had on our radar,” said Tim Canary, VP, engineering, NBC Sports. “It’s almost mind-boggling how much we were able to do in such a short time out of necessity. I’m proud of what the team has done, and it’s very humbling to see how everyone pulled together to pull this off.”

Since the PyeongChang 2018 Closing Ceremony, Stamford has continued moving toward an end-to-end IP-based facility while preparing for a 4K HDR future. At the same time, Canary and company have innovated in other ways as well, including launching a trio of “micro control rooms” (two based on SimplyLive and one on Ross Video Graphite all-in-one).

“Technologically, I think we’re stretching the boundaries and it’s truly a technological marvel how we’ve able to do all this,” said Canary. “There were things that we thought about for years that we ended up doing simply because we had no other choice during COVID. A lot of those things that would never have been strongly considered for prime shows are now

NBC Sports erected a digital network operations center in the lobby of its Stamford facility to support Peacock.

essential parts of our workflow, and we continue to harden those [tools]. It just forced us to come up with creative ways to do new things.”

NBC Sports installed a Grass Valley IP core router using GV’s Orbit Control system, UCP gateways, and XIP Frame Syncs on a Cisco leaf/spine architecture. The end-user interface was via an Evertz Magnum control system and panels featuring an Evertz BRC card to accommodate the multiple routing systems. Roughly half the content being produced in Stamford ran on this new router, including the entire Off-Tube Factory commentary operation.

“That gets us to a point where we can be completely formatindependent and be fully capable of 1080p HDR 3-Gbps across the board,” said Canary. “We can also intermix 50- and 60-Hz signals on an input-by-input basis, rather than a card-by-card basis, which we absolutely had to do in preparation for [the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics] since [China is a] 50-Hz country and we’ll still have a very large 60-Hz complement going on at the same time.”

In addition to the need to support mixed 50-Hz and 60-Hz workflows in Beijing, he added, the short timeline between the Tokyo Games and the Beijing Games in February played a major role in NBC’s decision to deploy the new Grass Valley IP core router.

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“Absolutely, our thinking for Tokyo was greatly influenced by our needs for Beijing,” Canary explained. “We knew we could not handle the mix of 50- and 60-Hz needs on our existing infrastructure; just wasn’t going to happen. Everything we did for that project was with an eye toward how we use it for Beijing and [whether] it meets those needs.”

In addition to the new core router, NBC completed a major upgrade in Central Tape and Ingest with the installation of EVS XT-VIA replay servers across the board. With native support for SMPTE ST 2110 and more than triple the internal bandwidth of the flagship XT3 server, the XT-VIA provides 12-plus channels of 1080p and six or more channels of UHD/4K in both SDR and HDR.

“We did a wholesale swap out of all the XT3’s for XT-VIA’s beginning pre-COVID,” said Canary. “We continued that during the pandemic. Some of those machines were supposed to go to Tokyo and then come back, so we had to do quite a dance of hardware to make sure we were covered both here and in Tokyo.”

In addition, during the pandemic, NBC swapped out two Sony MVS-7000 switchers for Sony XVS-9000 models in its largest control rooms in Stamford. The broadcaster also purchased another XVS-9000 for its IBC plant in Beijing. After the Winter Olympics, it will be shipped to Stamford and installed in PCR3. Two XVS-8000 switchers are being transferred from the former Golf Channel facility in Orlando (Golf Channel media operations migrated to Stamford near the end of 2020) and will be installed in PCR8 and PCR6. All control rooms will then have currentgeneration Sony XVS switchers.

“With those switchers and the IP router in place,” said Canary, “we’re getting very close to being [end-to-end IP]. I think the experience from the [IBC] build in Tokyo and all the learning that’s taking place there about IP will have a great influence on what we do here [moving forward] for sure.”

Even prior to the pandemic, NBC was looking for a simple way to produce the live gymnastics show in Tokyo remotely from Stamford. After exploring a variety of solutions, Canary’s team elected to build a control room based on SimplyLive’s ViBox allin-one production system.

“We did a lot of testing with it and were getting ready to go when the Olympics got postponed,” he said. “That gave us a lot of time to use that room for a lot of different sports, including golf, and we were very happy with the results. We ended up converting two offices into two more control rooms.”

The second micro control room was also based on SimplyLive technology but featured a more powerful audio console (instead of the Allen & Heath console, a Calrec Brio 12 is interfaced to Stamford’s Calrec Hydra2 audio network), which was used for the gymnastics show streaming live on Peacock.

The third micro control room was built around a Ross Video Graphite all-in-one production system and used to alleviate bottlenecks on larger control rooms when necessary (such as for the Stanley Cup Playoffs). Although it was not used for Olympics content, it did play a key role serving ancillary shows displaced by the Games.

“The second SimplyLive room and the Ross Graphite room never would have gotten done had the Games not been moved [back a year],” said Canary. “Many things were tipped over the edge because of [the pandemic], and it made us have to think of new ways to do things.”

PCR4 produced part of USA’s Olympics coverage.

NBC parked a quartet of mobile units at the truck dock in Stamford to aid in Olympics production. To connect the trucks with both the Stamford and Tokyo operations, the engineering team created a temperature-controlled equipment-interconnect room with gateways and 64 ins and outs to the Stamford routing system, as well as an AT&T/Media Links transmission frame that ties the trucks into the overall global transmission scheme.

The new equipment room was a result of NBC’s on-the-fly efforts to remotely produce the 2020 Kentucky Derby from Stamford.

“For the Derby during COVID,” Canary explained, “we had to quickly come up with a place to put the AT&T/Media Links frame on the dock. We took an old heavy metal announce booth, drilled some holes in it to get cables in and out, put it in the loading dock, and that was the housing for the AT&T frame. Obviously, we knew we had to do something better for Tokyo, so we built a stadium-style interconnect room at the loading dock to assist with all that.

“If we hadn’t had that extra year and been forced to adapt for the Derby,” he continued, “we wouldn’t have had the truck-bay interconnect room. Now our ability to pull trucks in and have them ready to go has been pretty great. It was certainly because the pandemic completely opened everybody’s eyes to needing that.”

The COVID era has seen many new technologies arrive at the Stamford facility: remote ChyronHego graphics operations for Sunday Night Football, an EEG automated closed-captioning system for Olympics live streams, and much more. However, Canary stressed, none of these innovations would have been possible without the core engineering and operations staff that powers Stamford year-round.

“It’s so easy to talk about technology,” he said, “but it’s the team behind it that truly makes the difference. Every Olympics, there are unsung athletic heroes who come out and win the gold in different sports. It’s the same thing here: people had opportunities that were just thrown at them.

“So much was added so quickly,” he continued, “that we had to ask people who had never done things on this level before to build entire systems. You don’t often give a junior heart surgeon the opportunity to do a heart transplant, but that was what we had to do — and all with COVID protocols and those challenges in place. And everyone truly delivered.” – JD

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TOKYO OLYMPIC GAMES: NBC

Inside the ‘Off-Tube Factory’ Remote Commentary Workflow

When the COVID-19 pandemic

shut down the U.S., sports networks audibled and kept on-air talent away from the venue. This is customary for an international event like the Olympics, but the decision also satisfied safety concerns and streamlined operations. In Stamford, NBC Sports developed the largest iteration of its Off- Tube Factory to add remote commentary to the XXXII Olympiad.

“[The Off-Tube Factory] at one point was one person, but now we have two shifts of two people [who run this] 24 hours a day,” said Tim Canary, VP, engineering, NBC Sports Group. “This is all coordinated with [CVT Supervisor/ Director] Kaare Numme, Gino Tanasescu, and the EVS team, so they’ll make sure that the feeds are routed and go through the testing process ahead of the event.”

To handle the profusion of shows and analysis, the studio-operations team worked closely with Senior Manager, Production Engineering, Gary Bartunek and his crew during each day’s events. The broadcaster transformed Studio 4 into the epicenter of the effort with a mini BOC (Broadcast Operations Center) manned 24 hours a day by two staffers.

All video signals were routed into 28 booths controlled in Stamford. Twenty-five announce booths (11 in Studio 4, nine in Studio 5, four in PCR1, one in PCR8) and a producer-only booth, which communicated with the commentators onsite in Tokyo, were in Stamford. Two announce booths were located at Telemundo’s facility in Miami.

Each commentary pod in Stamford comprised a play-byplay announcer, a color commentator, and a dedicated producer. Because of the ongoing pandemic, a wall separated the announcers, who were located next to each other; the producer worked on the opposite side of another wall. To troubleshoot audio issues, the Off-Tube Factory used four roaming A2s, who monitored each feed and announcer levels and also helped the announcers with headsets/boxes and the producer with comms.

On the announcers’ end, each talent received a world feed from OBS, a video feed from the corresponding Stamfordbased control room, a mixed-zone feed for specific sports, and a CIS (Connectivity Information System) computer for real-time data. The producers’ section of the booth provided communication with the talent, the production-control room, statistician, and the individual working in the central tape area.

Given the simultaneous nature of the Olympics, the announcers came from different networks to provide their expertise. Some of the 50 Olympics events were being called by high-profile industry names: for example, Jason Benetti and Eduardo Perez on baseball, Fran Fraschilla and Monica McNutt on

The Broadcast Operations Center (BOC) in Stamford

basketball, Kenny Albert on beach/indoor volleyball, Noah Eagle on 3×3 basketball, and Beth Mowins on softball. The audio side was worked out from every angle, including a workflow that streamlined commentary for both HDR and SDR productions.

“We’re using some of the processing paths for what we call ‘virtual’ booths,” said Canary. “If we’re calling something in 1080i, we can also route the video through a Lawo [V_pro8 video processor] so it can be done in 1080p HDR at the same time, with audio copied to both versions via MADI.”

Since the Stamford facility is massive, the operations team found ways to utilize empty spaces and unused rooms. Studio 4 was one example, but PCR5 was also being used as an extension of the Off-Tube Factory.

Statisticians were assigned to a booth for the duration of the sport’s broadcast. At their desk, all statisticians had an output monitor of the booth, communications with talent and producer, a CIS computer for stats, and space for an additional computer. In response to health and safety protocols, the Hawk-Eye system was used to feed research and data from the statisticians to an iPad in the announce booth.

Delivering the Tokyo Games to the masses was an impressive feat, but NBC Sports developed this plan as well for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics just six months away and for the upcoming season of Sunday Night Football. The infrastructure has come a long way since its first iteration in 2008, and it will continue to be the foundation of the network’s Olympics coverage moving forward.

“We started with 10 booths in 2008 for Beijing and then 18 booths in 2016 for Rio, and now we’re at 28 booths [for Tokyo],” said Canary. “We also left our SNF setup with a couple of Chyrons, because, in a week or so [after the Games], we’ll be doing a bootcamp with our graphics producers.” – KH

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TOKYO OLYMPIC GAMES: NBC

continued from page 36

driven by hosts Lindsay Czarniak, MJ Acosta-Ruiz, and Lolo Jones; the Twitter coverage starred LaChina Robinson and Adam Rippen. A Gymnastics Digital show was based in Studio 7, with hosts John Roethlisberger and Bridget Sloan, Producer Lana Sherman, and Director/ TD Corey Boudreau.

Driving these studios were five control rooms. PCR3 handled McHugh’s coverage on USA in Studio 2; the rest of the action on USA with Fareed in Studio 3 was driven by PCR4. PCR6 controlled the two digital shows on Peacock: Tokyo Gold in Studio 6 and Tokyo Tonight in Studio 3. PCR8 controlled a mix of linear and digital coming from Studio 1, including Live From, On Her Turf, and the Twitter-only coverage. The SimplyLive-based PCR9 was at the helm of the Gymnastics Digital show in Studio 7.

The 24-hour cycle of operations was controlled by two teams on separate daytime and nighttime shifts. With a new surge in COVID-19 cases in the U.S., the broadcaster prioritized the well-being of staffers. Throughout the long hours of the late night into early morning, control rooms received substantial cleaning to curb the potential spread of the virus. When cleaning was being done to a certain room or a competition overlapped into another, the production team that was without a technical home went to Live Media Group Gracie mobile unit in the docking bay.

“Distancing was one of the challenges that we needed to overcome, and this can’t be done without all of our departments working together,” noted Tom Popple, VP, studio operations and facilities, NBC Sports Group. “Previously, the Highlights Factory and other [workflows] were consolidated into one room, but this is something that we did for other events, like the NHL and Sunday Night Football.”

To stitch the studios and control rooms together, NBC Sports developed the Content Command Center: an area where the best highlight packages could be created for linear and digital coverage. Led by Manager, Editorial Content/Story Editor Megan Soisson, this new area took over the space used as a screening room by researchers for Football Night in America.

“Since OBS offers the highlights in a package,” said Popple, “we wanted to make sure we took advantage of it and give each day the best possible clips. The team sees the footage in here and calls to the producers to let them know of a great highlight.”

Besides all the PCRs in-house, NBC pulled up four mobile units at the truck dock in Stamford. Mobile TV Group’s 39 Flex (serving as PCR13) handled golf coverage (on Golf Channel and a 4K/UHD specialty channel), and HDX-41 handled beach volleyball — both in 1080p HDR. Meanwhile, Live Mobile Group’s Sophie (PCR11) was home to men’s and women’s basketball (in 1080i SDR), and Gracie served as the swing unit/backup PCR.

NBC Sports Group’s central tape and ingest team benefited from the upgrade to EVS XT-VIA production servers in advance of the Games.

To allow social distancing on the trucks, NBC moved graphics operators from the trucks to a trailer in the compound. An extra trailer was also on hand to house tech managers and provide extra space as needed.

MTVG’s trucks arrived early to serve as the home of NBC’s Open Championship coverage, which was produced remotely this year from Stamford due to COVID travel limitations. The Open provided NBA with a valuable opportunity to test and debug any issues prior to the Games.

“It has been quite an interesting puzzle trying to get all this together,” said Dominic Torchia, director, remote engineering and technology, NBC Sports Group. “Pre-COVID, we had only one truck that was scheduled to be here. But, after the COVID delay happened, [the production team] had to rethink the way that they were going to produce everything from the building, so we added these additional trucks. Thankfully, the mobile-unit vendors have been excellent about being flexible with us.”

All trucks were hooked into the interconnect room that NBC built this year to house the AT&T/MediaLinks transmission frame and other routing equipment. The trucks had dual 10-GB connectivity to the MediaLinks shelf, which connected to the broader AT&T network that NBC relied on to bring feeds from Tokyo. In addition, the trucks had access to 60+ feeds from the Stamford router system.

The trucks were equipped with Calrec consoles that connected to Calrec RP1 units at each venue in Tokyo (where announcers are located). The A1 directly controlled the audio mixer at the venues for the local announcing mix.

“That has actually worked flawlessly,” said Torchia. “The A1s have been happy with it, and it feels like they were onsite. Also, all the Olympics intercoms are trunked together, and these trucks are no exception. They’re all connected

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TOKYO OLYMPIC GAMES: NBC

so [the production team] can talk to anybody here, at any venue in Tokyo, or at 30 Rock or CNBC. It has been an amazing setup in terms of comms.”

In addition to Stamford as the primary base for content operations, NBC leveraged an additional seven U.S. locations for its sprawling Olympics operation.

30 Rock in New York City was home to the NBCSN production and handled all network commercial insertion. Telemundo’s Miami facility handled the Telemundo and Olympic Channel productions and also served as the home for wrestling and tennis live shows. CNBC broadcasts were produced out of its HQ in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. NBC’s NOC at Englewood Cliffs was also responsible for cable-network release, longform VOD, Off-Tube DR, and network DR. In Denver, NBC’s Dry Creek facility handled network transmission, network DR, cable DR, and the stations hub. And iStreamPlanet oversaw all streaming at its Las Vegas facility.

“Due to COVID,” said Canary, “we needed to travel fewer people and limit the footprint [in Tokyo] as much as we could, so we moved a lot of things to Stamford. But the challenge became that this building started to be too full, so we moved complete production-control rooms for different networks — like CNBC, NBCSN, and the Olympic Channel — to other

Play-by-play and color commentators work next to each other.

NBC Sports’ Tim Canary (left) and Tom Popple on the set in Studio 2

locations. That’s a huge change for us.”

In addition to the studios, control rooms, and trucks in Stamford, NBC created a “Friends & Family” production room, which integrated athletes’ loved ones into its Olympics coverage (since fans were not permitted at the venues in Tokyo). Canary and his team converted an RSN’s unused social-media–monitoring room to create the Friends & Family production room, and the effort paid off with clips lighting up social media night after night.

Friends & Family moments were often captured at family homes or private locations, with LTN deployed to connect families via remote setups and Microsoft Teams calls. NBC also had an ENG team on hand at the daily live USOPC/NBC watch party (5 p.m.–midnight ET) in the ballroom at the Loews Sapphire Falls hotel in Orlando (Stamford has four LTN connections to the hotel and two directly to Tokyo).

After a year-long delay fraught with unprecedented challenges, the NBC Olympics team looked to end its massive Tokyo campaign on a high note.

“It’s hard to put into words what everyone on the team went through to get here and the sacrifices that everyone made,” said Canary. “But to be here at this point is amazing. It’s very humbling to see how the people come together and rise to the challenge to get everything done and create all these new and exciting things.”

– Jason Dachman & Kristian Hernandez

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