NBC Sports reveals Winter Olympics technical partners

MediaKind, Telestream, EVS, Signiant, and Grass Valley have been working with American broadcaster NBC Sports on its Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics coverage.

NBC Sports is providing over 2,800 hours of coverage from the Winter Games, which is airing across NBC, Peacock, USA Network, CNBC, NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports app. It is its 18th Olympics broadcast, and 12th consecutive one.

Grass Valley has supplied a suite of IP and SDI routers and Densité signal management products, for the seventh Olympics and Paralympics in a row. To manage the scale and complexity of the production, the company’s IP technology, such as the Dynamic System Orchestrator, is being used to power the coverage.

Todd Donovan, vice-president of engineering technology for NBC Olympics, said: “The capabilities of Grass Valley’s suite of products, reflecting meaningful input from NBC Sports, has provided incredible flexibility to satisfy our Olympic production needs at the competition venues, International Broadcast Center in Beijing and at our headquarters in Stamford, Conn.

“This flexibility has been especially critical due to the unusually short turnaround between the Summer Games in Tokyo and these Winter Games.”

Meanwhile, MediaKind is providing video processing and advanced modular receiver technologies to support NBC Sports’ video distribution to viewers throughout the United States. In addition, MediaKind’s specialist engineers have assisted with the installation of equipment and system setup, and are present on-site to offer multi-site support throughout the event. 

MediaKind CEO Allen Broome said: “While content is now delivered to more platforms and screens than ever before, the same principles of successful live event coverage still apply: ensuring resiliency, reliability, and optimal picture quality.

“We have a very proud history supporting NBC Sports’ production of this event, and this partnership further demonstrates our long-term commitment to enabling the high-quality viewing experiences that captivate NBC Sports viewers.”

Telestream provided media capture, automated media processing, closed captioning, and test and measurement equipment. This includes Telestream’s Vantage Media Processing Platform, Cinnafilm Tachyon processing library, Lightspeed Live Capture and Vantage, 4K/8K HDR Waveform Monitors and its caption authoring and editing product in conjunction with its Timed Text Speech service.

In addition, the NBC Sports Advanced Technology group worked with Telestream to develop custom color LUTs (Look Up Tables) that are used within Vantage to ensure the most accurate color processing pipeline throughout the production and postproduction process.

Darryl Jefferson, VP of post operations and digital workflow at NBC Sports & Olympics, said: “At this Winter Games in Beijing, never before has NBC Sports embarked on an enterprise that has so many simultaneous formats, standards, or deliverable derivations to both normalize, convert, or orchestrate.

“From applying custom LUTS for seamless single stream HDR/SDR productions, to re-wrapping growing files to make possible real-time collaboration, Telestream will make all those file-based workflows that our remote production rely upon, possible.”

EVS supplied its LiveCeption Signature solution to the 1080p – UHD HDR live production at its International Broadcast Centers in Beijing and Stamford, providing its flagship XT-VIA servers and LSM-VIA replay and highlights systems.

Quentin Grutman, chief customer officer at EVS, said: “LiveCeption Signature has been designed at its core to meet even the most demanding live production requirements, and we are confident this solution will enhance NBC Sports’ visual narrative of the event.”

Signiant provided its intelligent file transfer software, allowing NBC to move petabytes of HDR and 4K footage from Beijing back to its headquarters in Stamford, USA. 

Mike Flathers, Signiant’s chief solutions officer, said: “These types of remote workflows are critical in today’s environment and Signiant is proud to play such an important role in enabling NBC Sports to leverage their team and technology located halfway around the world.”

Avid continued a partnership of over two decades with NBC Sports, and provided its MediaCentral platform, Media Composer editing software, and shared storage solutions from its International Broadcast Center in Stamford, Conn., to drive remote and on-site production workflows for its production across multiple platforms.

NBC’s Jefferson said: “NBC Sports again relies on these tools to edit and deliver a wide variety of HDR, SDR, 50 and 60Hz content to each of our businesses, from cable to our Peacock streaming service.”