When Mazza thinks about the “Olympics at Home,” his thoughts go not to a living room but to the “virtual International Broadcast Center” (IBC) that his NBC team developed for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. As director of engineering, Mazza led the team that developed an infrastructure, which let part of NBC’s massive control center operate at New York headquarters, fully integrated with the on-site control center in Atlanta. Three dozen video feeds went up to New York, where replay servers, graphics creation terminals and other production tools were based. Live productions came from the control room in Atlanta, but taped or time-shifted material ran from 30 Rock in New York. 

This corporate decision to put a permanent sports operations center at headquarters was designed to minimize the expense and effort of building a full control facility at every Olympics venue. The current IBC in Stamford, Conn. opened in 2013, built by Mazza’s team to supplement the re-usable infrastructure that NBC moves to new locations for Olympic coverage.

“In ’96, we had to pioneer a lot of stuff that nobody thought would work,” Mazza recalled. “All the remote control and Ethernet-based controls did not exist. File-based workflows did not exist; the concept of remote-controlled anything was brand new.” 

Mazza is planning for the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics in 2021. He envisions six control rooms in Japan working with three trucks on site — all controlled from truck docks in Stamford.  

Mazza said he and his team have been working like this for 14 years, adding that it’s the only way they could have produced such a large amount of video content. NBC has been using some of the same virtual tactics for college football productions during the pandemic. 

He’s also enthusiastic about the value of tools such as media asset management, which has become vital throughout production. 

“You need persistence, passion and insatiable curiosity about how things work,” Mazza said. “Also, an unrelenting attention to detail and testing.” Given everything that can go wrong during a live sportscast, Mazza said metaphorically, “You have to design your systems for resilience on a bad day, not a perfectly clear sunny day.”

STAMFORD, Conn.—Molly Solomon will now carry the torch and lead NBC Olympics’ coverage, as NBC Sports Group has named her the executive producer and president of NBC Olympics Production. She will also continue to serve as the executive producer for the Golf Channel.

Solomon has worked at NBC Sports for three decades, which has included working on 10 Olympics, including being the coordinating producer of the 2012 London Olympics Opening Ceremony and primetime show. She has been with the Golf Channel since 2012.

In her new role for NBC’s Olympics coverage, Solomon will be tasked with overseeing all day-to-day editorial production for the Games, as well as Olympic Channel: Home of Team USA. She will report to Pete Bevacqua, president of NBC Sports Group.

“As a broadcast partner at the PGA of America, and now as a colleague at NBC Sports, I’ve had a front-row seat watching Molly skillfully and creatively lead a tremendous GOLF Channel production team,” said Bevacqua. “We are excited to put oversight of our Olympic presentation into her exceptionally-qualified hands, and are especially proud to see a long-time and well-liked member of our NBC team return to her roots.”

“I can’t wait to dig in and work more broadly on the Tokyo Olympics, which will be the biggest media event in the world,” said Solomon.

The Tokyo Olympics will take place in the summer of 2020.

Solomon will now be based at NBC Sports Group’s International Broadcast Center in Stamford, Conn.