DEEP DIVE

It was a busy year for the team at NBC Sports, beginning with the Super Bowl and Beijing Olympics and continuing through with PGA coverage, Sunday Night Football, and much more. Chip Adams, now a consultant but former NBC Olympics, VP of venue engineering; Craig Bernstein, VP, remote technical ops and engineering; Darryl Jefferson, SVP, engineering and technology; and David Mazza, SVP and CTO, discussed the year’s accomplishments

Before the Tokyo Games were postponed, the plan was to do a dualstream HDR and SDR production. But the one-year delay allowed the NBC Olympics team to create a single stream workflow. But when the decision was made to have the main production gallery for the Beijing Games in Stamford rather than Beijing the team had to pivot once again. Dave Mazza explains:

Mazza: Our plan was to ship the equipment from Tokyo to Beijing but when we realized [we would move the primetime control room to Stamford we had to mobilize the troops in the IBC, pull out all the HDR gear, and sent it back to Stamford because with all the supply chain problems we probably weren’t going to order enough stuff to convert Stamford to HDR. So that was a big change we made technologically along the way.

Having so many production personnel back home for the Beijing Games impacted venue operations. Chip Adams, who was in Beijing, discussed the challenges:

Adams: As the playbook changed, we had to downsize our equipment and operations. We reduced onsite venue operations down to about two venues — figure skating and alpine skiing and extreme sports — and we had production people onsite but no talent. Typically, we would have 2,000 people onsite, but for Beijing we only had 750 people.

We also had to move our field shop operations into the IBC because the field shop was outside of the [closed loop to protect against COVID]. We didn’t really have space for it and all of a sudden we’re doing our cable allocations in a small room that had network connectivity so we could do a lot of pre-testing with Stamford. But getting the equipment out was a three-day process because the equipment had to go to a holding area and be tested for COVID.

The Friends and Family segments connected athletes at the games with friends and family back home live via two-way video conferencing. Darrell Jefferson discusses the effort and why it was so successful:

Jefferson: We put a lot of cameras in the living rooms and backyards of the families of the athletes because they were not allowed in the stands. And it gave us a new vantage point and added a layer to the production. Also moving some of the production back home is something we’ve proven is possible so now we need to figure out when it is appropriate.

NBC Sports did the impossible when they produced a Super Bowl in the middle of a Winter Olympics. Craig Bernstein discussed the efforts:

Bernstein: The biggest challenge of Los Angeles was the scope as we had six locations throughout the city. We had to do a lot of planning work with the transmission and IT teams to connect everything back to SoCal Stadium. There were eight different mobile units connected from outside SoCal and we built an EVS network with 33 servers and 20 virtual IP Directors to give everyone access to share files and move signals. That worked flawlessly.