TV Technology Europe Editor Mark Hallinger is in Vancouver covering
NBC's Olympics coverage and shared some of his thoughts about the
experience:
"What are the technology stories of the Winter
Olympic Games? Sometimes it’s hard to tell when you’re in the middle of
it, as every angle is just a tree in the forest. I’ve been here just
over a week now, covering the coverage of NBC Olympics courtesy of Dave
Mazza and crew, and taking some time to talk to other broadcasters and
the ‘host’ broadcaster, Olympic Broadcast Services (OBS).
To be sure, it’s an HD story, and truly the first fully-HD
Winter Games. But Beijing was a much bigger ‘first HD Olympics’ really,
in terms of the number of venues and hours of competition, etc.
Between working on a few side projects and the sheer size of
what’s going on in the halls and rooms of the IBC, one thing that
really does stand out is just how far along servers and file-based
workflows have crept in to an event like this. They haven’t crept in,
it’s been an avalanche over the last five years or less.
So much of what NBC is doing here comes courtesy of servers
and the workflows they allow. NBC’s ‘Highlights Factory’ is where more
than 1,017 clips for the web, iTunes, sell-through on Amazon.com, VOD,
mobile phone video etc. were created as of Wednesday of this past week,
a bit more than half way through the event. It used seven EVS XT-2
servers and about 20 seats of EVS’ IP Director, which were used to
manage the content on the servers and create basic clips.
It’s not an Avid when it comes to polishing pieces, but it’s a
shallow learning curve that has allowed NBC to use English speaking
local talent to handle the load. Most, if not all of these workers, had
not used the software until just prior to the event. Can you imagine
trying to create that many clips in a non-networked, linear world?
Getting those clips home in a hurry required the use of an
Omneon MediaGrid, which also converted files to 50 Mb Long GOP ready
for transfer to a second MediaGrid in New York using Omneon’s ProCast
data transfer acceleration system.
And that’s just a bit on how important servers were to the
new media part of the broadcast. The overall broadcast production
workflow also relied on XT-2 servers, from ingest through to sending
requested clips over to an Avid ISIS storage array, to EVS for
play-out. The ability to do file transfers directly from EVS to Avid
continues to be a huge time saver, and something that has only been
happening since around the Torino Games in 2006.
And the host has made huge changes this time around as well,
all reliant on pushing servers and clips-as-files deeper into the
workflow. Everything from pushing content to a satellite feed on a
regular basis for smaller rightsholders with no on-site presence, to
allowing rightsholders to access clips directly off venue servers, to
an expanded Olympic News Channel Operation (ONC), using networked EVS
production and the somewhat new Xedio software. ONC journalists at the
venues are able to send full-res clips back to the IBC via a laptop
with a Gigabit Ethernet connection.
More on these host beakthroughs later...
(Be sure to check the April 12 issue of TV Technology for our entire Winter Olympics wrapup!).