PARIS—Citius, Altius, Fortius has traditionally been the motto for the Olympic Games, Latin words for “Swifter, Higher, Stronger.” In 2021, the motto was officially modified to be Citius, Altius, Fortius – Communiter, meaning “Swifter, Higher, Stronger – Together.”

As we roll up to the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, July 26-Aug. 11, NBC, the official U.S. broadcaster for the games, will demonstrate its interpretation of the motto with a broadcast that is swifter, higher and stronger. The network has been working for nearly two years in both Paris and at the NBC Sports hub in Stamford, Conn., to ensure that everything has been pulled together, according to Darryl Jefferson, senior vice president of engineering and technology for NBC Olympics and Sports.

Pre-Configured, Pre-Tested and Pre-Installed
This will be Jefferson’s first games as head of NBC Olympics’ tech operations, succeeding long-time veteran Dave Mazza, who retired in 2022. Jefferson has been with NBC Olympics since 2008, managing Post Production and Asset Management teams and was instrumental in the development of the networks’ innovative Highlights Factory/Asset Management System.

“We started design and peer review about 20 months ago, with build, configure and test in our integration facility,” Jefferson said. “We tested video paths, workflows, delivery mechanisms and failure modes all before items shipped out. We ship gear mostly pre-configured, pre-installed, and pre-tested, for both speed of deployment and for peace of mind.”

With a broadcast as complex as the Olympics, with numerous venues and the need to integrate feeds from the primary Olympics video system, the number of moving parts is staggering. Take something like the intercom system—viewers are never aware of it, but it plays a crucial role in coordinating between all the different venues and crews.

“It has indeed been quite a challenge,” he said. “Our dedicated comms group has especially focused on inter-communication with our large presence in Stamford. Candidly, managing those comms-trunking resources at this size and scale has required re-thinking and expanding many of our core resources, and resources that are also sent out at our venues, as well. Part of the challenge of lashing up two cities far apart is seamlessly allowing folks to communicate.”

Seamless to Viewers
Moving its system to a new Olympics venue every two years is an incredible challenge, but NBC will ensure viewers will see a seamless broadcast—so seamless that many may not realize that although the action is happening in Paris, many of the commentators and on-air talent will be in Stamford.

(Read: NBC to Air Record Amount of Live Paris Olympics Coverage)

Among many benefits of this Paris-to-Stamford approach is that the network has less equipment to rip out and relocate—or abandon—after each Olympic broadcast. It seems counter-intuitive that having two such widely separated technical areas and operations is more efficient than having it all in one place, but the reality is that separation increases speed and efficiency.

“The biggest leap is splitting large parts of our team between Paris and Stamford,” Jefferson said. “Transporting large quantities of cameras, effects gear and studios full of equipment all the way home has historically not been financially viable. In some cases, the latency was unacceptable. That split approach allows us to cover more sports with fewer total people traveling than just a few Games ago.”

However, between the time of the old four-year cycle and the new two-year cycle that took effect 30 years ago, the industry has gone through a revolution in connectivity and capability.

“With new tools, robust networks, capacity with cloud infrastructure, and the ability to approach signal transport differently, there exists a whole host of new options today,” he said.

Emerging Technologies
High-end sports broadcasts are among the first to use emerging technologies, and NBC’s preparation to broadcast more than 5,000 hours of live Olympics coverage from Paris is no exception. Add in the complexity of covering a sporting event spread over several arenas and locations, and it’s like preparing for the Super Bowl… times 10.

Jefferson and his team found there were several new things that had to be handled carefully for this Olympics broadcast, which will be broadcast in 4K/HDR and 5.1.4 immersive audio.

(Read: Peacock to Use AI-Generated Al Michaels' Voice for Recaps of Olympic Games)

“It may be a tie between getting HDR support everywhere we may need it, and the large cut over to support IP in many places,” he said. “Although we’ve had important experience with both, there exist so many devices, solutions, vendors and third parties that do not support wide color gamut today, or equipment through which color information doesn’t survive.

“Testing every graphics device or element of delivery to ensure all is consistent has required a decent amount of patience,” Jefferson added. “In a similar way, building a resilient and nimble IP system has also been a process.”

I assumed that the native Olympic video infrastructure would be 4K/UHD. However, Jefferson said that is not the case. “Our format is 1080p HDR [HLG] at 50Hz,” he said. “We are thrilled that this mezzanine format will be supported at every venue and site.”

As you might imagine, a very large number of vendors provide the gear to make the broadcasts work. In addition to the gear that NBC brings to the Olympics, the Olympics organization has its own broadcast service that works behind the scenes and supports all national broadcasters. The Olympics Broadcast Services (OBS) positions all the cameras at the events and provides feeds and much more to the dozens of national broadcasters, including NBC.

“We have worked with OBS on their camera positions and event orchestration,” Jefferson said. “We also worked with Sony on switchers, cameras and monitors, with EVS on replay devices and IP orchestration, with Grass Valley/Cisco on core /IP routing, Avid on editing and asset management, Chyron on graphics, Riedel on SimplyLive, and so many more.”

‘Healthy Mixture’ of IP and SDI
One of the most basic decisions assembling a system of this size is where to use the SMPTE ST 2110 IP video standard and where to use the older SMPTE SDI standard. Where and how these two are used makes a big difference in how signals are routed, and routing signals at the Olympics is one of the core tasks.

“We have a healthy mixture of both, but are about 60% ST 2110 handoff, venue and core orchestration,” Jefferson said. “In some cases, we support both formats within a Tech Center, or gateway translation to convert one to the other. Fortunately, we have spent the last few Games [since Tokyo] making the transition over time, and certainly learning all the lessons.”

(Read: NBCU to Expand Accessibility Efforts to Record Levels of Summer Olympics)

Jefferson detailed how the NBC Olympics team took IP/SDI integration step-by-step in order to maximize compatibility and minimize conflicts. “First [we used] a lifeboat router, larger core switches, and a split router in support of both HDR/SDR,” he said. Now [we have] one single format, signal redundancy and a streamlined approach. Each of these steps has been critical in uncovering the complexity and flexibility of IP.”

In addition to SDI and ST 2110, NBC is also using some of NewTek’s semi-proprietary Network Device Interface (NDI) standard. “We are using NDI in some areas, specifically NDI v6, with support of HDR and enhanced audio,” Jefferson said.

Viewer Insight
Jefferson promised a host of new features for NBC’s broadcast of the Summer Olympics. A lot of it sounds technical, but the goal is to give the viewer insight that wasn’t previously possible.

“We have a whole trove of new technology, some of which is well behind the camera [ST 2110 and Dante, HDR and ATMOS everywhere], new encoding mezzanine formats, and also a good deal of enhancements to bring viewers further behind the scenes,” he said. “Backstage cameras, audio from coaches, cameras in the stands with families, even biometrics on family and coaches. The goal of all this technology is to bring more elements of storytelling around each athlete’s journey.”

The Olympics are more than just another big sporting event. It is an international cultural experience, a massive stage on which scandals are magnified and missteps are ridiculed. Bad guys have been known to use this hyper-focus of media to perpetrate big crimes—and viewers expect that such coverage will be captured with all the depth and clarity of the sports events themselves.

However, the winning part of the broadcast is the part that tells the small stories: The struggles, burdens, perseverance and stamina of the individuals who participate. When the camera shows the sweat on a face and fierceness in the eyes, it is giving you what you can only get from an experienced and well-equipped television crew.

This summer, NBC stands poised to deliver its best Olympics yet.

RIO DE JANIERO— During his more than eight years with NBC, Darryl Jefferson, vice president for Post Operations & Digital Workflow, NBC Sports & Olympics, has seen the rapid evolution of production advances for the network’s Olympics coverage. He’s directed the network’s Olympics production to an entirely file-based workflow, which has enabled NBC to enhance and accelerate its move to multiplatform distribution and enabled its Stamford, Conn. headquarters to serve as the hub for Olympics production. In a recent interview with TV Technology, Darryl discussed his role at the Rio Games and how NBC is ramping up its technical infrastructure to deliver more than 2,000 hours of Olympic linear programming across 11 networks.

TV TECHNOLOGY: What is the difference in your role now as opposed to what it was in London?

DARRYL JEFFERSON: I now oversee the post-production operations for the sports group, so all of our football, NASCAR, all the other things we do in the so-called “off-season” and the Olympics. I also oversee our digital workflow group that does asset management, file movement, file registration, graphics, post-audio, that type of thing. The team is larger and also does more than the Olympics.

TVT: In your transition to VP, was it a case of basically adapting a lot of the techniques that you learned in Olympics production to other sports production at NBC?

DJ: Yes, every workflow has to be slightly tailored, but yes. Some of the technology—such as the technology stack that we're using in the Olympics, we know it will scale to this many concurrent programs, so you're able to really test the waters at this kind of intense event and know that for 17 weeks of football, or for the length of the hockey season, or for some longer period of time, you know you have solid technology.

TVT: What is different in what you're doing in Rio than what you were doing in London, or Sochi for that matter?

DJ: There's a lot that’s different. In London, for example—because, at the time, we had what we thought was a lot of connectivity between New York and London—we replicated both high- and low-res footage. Things would be recorded in London and replicated to both high- and low-res back to our “mothership,” which at that point was Studio 8H at 30 Rock.

NBC Olympics has a team of approximately 1,000 managing its Olympics programming in its Stamford Conn. sports facility that opened in 2013.

Nowadays, we're moving and recording and there's so much file movement, it's much more efficient to just replicate the proxies, in both directions between the venue and our new home-base in Stamford, Connecticut. What that means is we now have 120 channels in two cities—one in Rio and one in Stamford—and the proxies are replicating from Stamford to Rio and from Rio to Stamford, so all users see all recordings. This is in lieu of just moving unnecessary content around. If someone goes to do something, for instance, cut a sequence and send something to a playoff device or send something for edit, it goes back to the place it was recorded, grabs that subset of the high-res, grabs just that and sends it to where it needs to be.

TVT: In other words, you're not duplicating the high-res proxy in Rio, only if needed?

DJ: Correct. It's much more efficient and yes, we have more connectivity, but it really helps us to be more efficient in terms of the bandwidth used for every record. It also lets us capture more things and it's seen by more people. In addition, in Rio, our five big venues in athletics, swimming, gymnastics, beach volleyball, and golf, also can peer into all of those records, clip off shots, send them to themselves, and also other cities in North America can reach into Stamford and do the same, including the Golf Channel in Orlando, our contact media center in Colorado, New York News, 30 Rock, and of course Stamford. All those people are using the two main hubs of Stamford and Rio to peer into this mass of content rolling into the facility.

TVT:What’s the workforce breakdown between Rio and Stamford in term of personnel numbers?

DJ: I have a whole team here in Rio. We also have about 1,000 people in our home-base in Stamford. There's a whole team there managing that effort. What used to be in 8H is now in the Stamford center.

TVT: What's new on the Highlight Factory side of things now?

DJ: The Highlight Factory has gotten bigger. We have more people working in Stamford, in the Highlight Factory, more people physically in the room and we're using a bunch of different tools. The entire [metadata] logging application is happening in Stamford. We have just over 70 loggers adding metadata that's immediately visible to everyone that's looking at media. Those are some new things.

TVT: Has the goal towards multiplatform distribution pretty much remained the same from the past two to four years?

DJ: It's the same production path but the world has changed a lot. We're pumping out to a lot more. We're pumping out to smart televisions, set-top boxes for a variety of cable providers; we're pumping out to more people with closed-captioning, more people with video descriptives. The outlets we're reaching out to is growing as well. We're streaming out to troops overseas in the Armed Forces Network, there's just more of the outlets. So, yes it's the same but the same is now twice as big.

TVT: I've got to ask this question. Is there any part of the production now that is not file based?

DJ: That's a fair question, but no. Occasionally, we make a dub for other broadcasters. We do multiformat to output tapes to others, but no, nothing. Our cameras are all card- or drive-based.

TVT: Did you find all the facilities in Rio are up to your standards, as far as being fiber-based and having the ability to just plug in and go?

DJ: Yeah, and to be fair, the IBC (International Broadcast Centre) is a hub for more than just NBC and their fiber infrastructure is here. We brought a whole lot of fiber—that was one of the new big things we had for these Games—and moving forward, we’re changing our background in the IBC to a fiber infrastructure, and then tying that into a POP (point of presence) and then getting diverse connections. We have 40 GB of connectivity between here and Stamford. That's partially procured by NBC-U and partially by OBS (Olympic Broadcasting Services). We have partnerships with Level 3, AT&T and the OBS to get that connectivity.

TVT: How are you handling 4K/UHD coverage?

DJ: It's certainly it's own kind of beast. We have basically a linear channel, linear delivery for 4K. We have a 4K controller on cutting a linear program. We're covering the opening and closing ceremony in 4K and we're also mixing the opening ceremony in Atmos on a trial basis. We're also delivering assets via file delivery out to our meet-me point in Colorado for cable companies and others to pick up. It's a different path. It's not like we're taking everything and simply then converting it for a regular broadcast, it's a parallel process at this point. 

Anecdotally, it's just interesting to see it and it feels like globally we're all putting our toes in the water. I think broadcasters are seeing what they can do, people are excited to see it at home, but really we have to run through the paces and it'll be a process to find out where, how, where appropriate, and if and when people have the kind of appetite. We hope they do. 

TVT: Anything new on the audio side?

DJ: In addition to using Atmos for the Opening Ceremony, we're actually leaving our post-produced audio at home so there's a Pro Tools rig still in Stamford, a Pro Tools room for sweetening, so that will be done remotely through file exchange. That's absolutely new and we're mixing each of the venues in 5.1. There is a patchwork of 5.1 in stereo at each of the venues. 

TVT: How are you handling storage?

DJ: Harmonic is our central SAN, the place where we store all of the video files that are being recorded on the record wall. That’s all being recorded by Media Decks as the principle recording device and are writing to Media Grids in a central SAN. We have 988 TB of Media Grid in Rio and we have just under that in Stamford, so that's almost two petabytes of storage and we'll fill it in the 17 days. I have at least a handful of dollars riding on that, just internally some bets. "You'll never need that much storage" they say and I'll laugh and say "I'll bet you on which day we'll fill it." The Stamford facility runs on Media Grid, that's the central SAN, 24/7, and it only makes sense to have a sister grid in our host city and have the two grids replicate between the two.

TVT: You have redundancy in both in Rio and Stanford, basically?

DJ: It's both redundant and it's also recording different content. Stamford is recording our cable day parts, as they’re based out of Stamford. They're recording all the local production that's happening in Stamford. They're also doing other sports that we're focused on. Here in Rio, we're recording all the live competition feeds and their different stages in some of the control rooms that are coming out of here, some of the NBC feeds from trucks that are at some of the venues, and so on. They're recording different things and replicating to each other. It is redundant equipment, but it's not recording the same thing and it's not simply a backup for the other.