STAMFORD, CONN.—NBC Sports has selected Chyron to provide technology for data-rich graphics for its production of the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics and Paralympics, Feb. 6-22, and March 6-15, respectively.

NBC Sports will utilize Chyron PRIME CG to produce live broadcast graphics to display names, athlete information, scores, statistics, leaderboards, headshots and more for its production of the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics. The full spectrum of top-tier design and data integration features in these Chyron technologies will be utilized, along with highly customizable playout Control Panels, enabling operators to display graphics and information quickly, accurately and on-brand throughout the Games in northern Italy, helping NBC Sports route the excitement back to viewers watching coverage of the Games in the United States.

“As we gear up for our coverage of the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics, we are continuing our long-standing partnership with Chyron, built on a foundation of reliability and innovation. The advanced capabilities of the Chyron Prime platform, from real-time graphics to creative studio elements, empower our design teams to enhance live coverage and analysis. Its integrated data feeds enable fast, meaningful storytelling that gives viewers at home a deeper understanding of just how extraordinary these performances are,” said Stacey Georgiou, vice president, production engineering at NBC Sports.

Chyron has worked with NBC Sports for over 20 years, assisting NBC Sports’ production efforts at previous Olympics and other major international sports events throughout the world.

“NBC Sports is not just a customer for us, but a strategic partnership that drives innovation,” states Chyron CEO Mike Truex, “and we are always excited to see those innovations driving content that delights the whole world at major events like the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.”

Click here for more on NBCUniversal’s Milan Cortina 2026 programming.

TV Tech’s overall coverage of NBC Sports' overall tech plans for the 2026 Winter Games can be found here, here and here.

It's happened: The realistic virtual sets and advanced news graphics that have been wowing TV viewers for years have become accepted elements of broadcast production. 

“It’s no longer a gimmick,” said Ray Ratliff, Vizrt’s Product Evangelist, XR. “Broadcasters and media producers are leveraging these technologies to help them tell their stories, expanding the depth and richness of their stories in new and powerful ways.”

Better Quality, Easier to Use
Just because virtual sets and advanced news graphics have come of age doesn't mean that these technologies are standing still. In fact, advances in both technologies explain why they continue to impress viewers and news producers alike.

“The improvements in tracking technology for virtual sets have been a game-changer,” said Mike Paquin, Ross Video’s Senior Product Manager, Virtual Solutions, “These systems are now incredibly precise and reliable, which means they require less maintenance and can be used daily without the need for constant recalibration. 

"The improvement in control systems is also significant: in the past, there were standalone control systems which required a dedicated operator, but with technology like Voyager and Lucid, the control side can be easily integrated with existing workflows, eliminating the need for dedicated operators and extensive training.”

Advanced news graphics have also become easier to use, accelerating the adoption of virtual sets and augmented reality (AR) in TV news production.

“One factor driving this trend has been increasing simplicity in use for day-to-day graphics,” said Aldo Campisi, Chyron’s Vice President for Latin America, Caribbean, Spain & Portugal. “We’ve focused on simplifying and deskilling daily use of virtual sets and/or augmented reality, even enabling our customers to extend the CAMIO newsroom automation workflow they use for traditional graphics into the world of virtual sets and virtual graphics,” he said. “With this functionality, producers can use a familiar tool set to build graphics in 3D space, in augmented reality, and in virtual sets all while maintaining data visualization functionality.” 

Thanks to the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into virtual set and news graphics systems, achieving “real-time photorealism is easier and more cost-effective than ever before,” said Ratliff. At the same time, the ability to format these effects into templates is simplifying and speeding up the production process “without impacting staffing requirements.”

The Impact 
Collectively, advances in virtual sets and news graphics are allowing broadcasters to explain stories to their viewers in new and visually exciting ways. 

For instance, when Thailand’s Amarin TV wanted to explain the progress of an election during a results broadcast, “they visualized the candidates as runners on a race track,” said David Dowling, Chief Revenue Officer with Pixotope Technologies. “Depending on how well they were doing or how big their numbers were, the graphics showed their positions on the track, plus whether they were still fresh or tired, or about to give up the ghost.”

Meanwhile, when Iceland’s RUV TV wanted to explain the latest volcano that had erupted on that island nation, “they incorporated an AR volcano onto their news set,” Dowling said. “It was a story-telling element that really helped their presenters explain what was going on.”

Across the TV broadcast industry, “we see customers using immersive graphics to put their presenters in the middle of the action,” said Ratliff. “Broadcasters place their people in fully virtual environments, bringing more significant presence and context to their stories, helping viewers understand the content better. We’ve seen incredible examples of this globally on a variety of coverage whether it's elections, sports or other major news.” 

“Graphics are now truly telling the story in an immersive way, and they're not just being used in virtual sets, where talent is in front of a green screen,” Campisi added. “Visual storytelling is also being enhanced with augmented graphics. The presenter might be standing in front of a true LED video wall with graphics that are brought into extended reality, creating an immersive experience that empowers the newsroom team to demonstrate, visualize, and story tell with much greater detail and emphasis.”

What’s Coming Next
As impressive as virtual sets and news graphics are today, they are likely to wow viewers even more in the years to come. At the same time, the trend in these technologies is to make them less obvious to the viewer, rather than more. 

“I think that photorealism is something that people are crying out for and I can certainly see that trend having an impact on the way in which graphics are presented,” Dowling said. “Even if it's just a lower third or a bug, the look will be as close to real life as possible.”

Meanwhile, the technologies that have revolutionized the look of TV news appear destined to break out of this niche. 

“At Chyron, we’re increasingly being asked for solutions that help our customers commercialize their productions,” said Campisi. “By its very nature, a 3D virtual set offers more spaces that may be digitally branded than with simpler 2D graphics. Looking ahead, we can see how advanced skeletal tracking and visualization — to the point that it’s highly representative and realistic — could be translated across sports and entertainment. 

“For example, a match targeting a younger demographic could feature all the well-known athletes on a team stylized to look like characters from a popular animated series or an epic space opera,” Campisi added. “In other words, properties and brands could be marketed and monetized in remarkable new ways to realize exponential returns.” 

Advances in GPUs, AI tools, and decreasing LED prices are now blurring the lines between virtual and actual reality, according to Campisi. 

“These innovations will enable hyper-realistic, immersive sets and interactive presentations, enhanced by AR and MR integration. Cloud-based flexibility, real-time automation, and lifelike virtual characters will revolutionize newsroom graphics, pushing the boundaries of visual media.”

SAN FRANCISCO—If the last year has proven anything, it’s that broadcasters are a resilient bunch. In March 2020, when newsroom stations began to be shuttered, news staff scrambled for ideas to pull off productions at home. 

Despite some hiccups, many stations across the country pulled off a successful, on-the-fly runaround because newsroom production technologies proved up to the task—the ability to pull in content, edit proxy material, upload graphics, cache locally—all with the final goal of covering breaking news faster even though they weren’t in the newsroom at all. 

Consider the obstacles: security restrictions, VPN hurdles and the related problems of less-than-adequate broadband connections, licensing limitations, news workflow disruptions and more. Despite all that, the work needed to be done. 

THE CRUCIAL ROLE OF CLOUD

“While anyone can bring an on-premises editor into their house, it’s the team collaboration, news production workflow and management of files that is problematic. There is simply no editorial process or metadata management [in place],” said Raoul Cospen, director of product strategy for news at Dalet.

For any station pushed into a pandemic workaround, access to the cloud proved key as did a way of managing many reporters and editors in multiple locations. 

“We had a number of news customers asking for help to support their remote workforces and adjust their infrastructure so that it could support editing from home,” said Bea Alonso, chief market officer at Dalet. The company’s answer to newsroom shutdowns was Dalet Galaxy xCloud, a cloud-based newsroom solution, she said.

“[It] allowed our customers to offload some of their teams to work on Dalet-hosted infrastructure while being away from the physical newsroom,” Alonso said. “Other clients used it as an extension of their on-premise Dalet installation, to provide business continuity to reporters, producers and editors.”

One interesting element about Galaxy xCloud, Alonso said, is that it provides tools familiar to anyone familiar with working in a physical newsroom. This meant there was no additional training required to enable people to produce, edit, write scripts and collaborate with their teams from their homes, Alonso said.

One broadcaster that made quick use of this tool was France Télévisions, the national television network of France, which employed Galaxy xCloud to enable news workflows from home. The SaaS-based system helped facilitate end-to-end remote news production workflows, giving them the flexibility to support remote work for its more than 300 journalists. 

In addition to concerns over bandwidth, security and licensing issues, working from home created another speedbump: how does a broadcaster handle team collaboration, news production workflow and management of files when your team is no longer in the same room? 

By working with Amazon Web Services and their cloud capabilities, Galaxy xCloud securely connected staff at home to the Dalet Galaxy five on-premise media asset management system. This gave journalists during the pandemic access to tools like the Dalet OneCut news editor so they could search the production system, collaborate with producers and edit growing files. 

“It’s seamless integration whether you are at home, in the newsroom or in the field,” Cospen said.

News organizations also tapped into new mobile applications such as the Dalet On-the-Go mobile newsroom application, which  enables a remote reporter to connect to their newsroom with a mobile device and write scripts, upload content to the newsroom and use the mobile device as a teleprompter. 

“User demand during the pandemic accelerated the development of this mobile app,” Alonso added.

GOING VIRTUAL

But newsroom production technology wasn’t the only tool that stepped into the abyss during the early days of the pandemic.

When U.K. radio station talkRADIO wanted to create video programming to stream online alongside its radio programming, it considered using a virtual set system, but this was made trickier by the fact that guests had to stay socially distanced while in the studio or had to call in by Zoom. 

“We were looking at innovative solutions to engage our audiences and satisfy our advertisers, over and above what other radio broadcasters are doing,” said Nick Prater, head of broadcast technology for Wireless Group Media, which operates 11 radio stations in the U.K. “We determined that virtual studio technology was now mature and could provide the unique advantage we needed.”

The answer turned out to be a StarTracker Studio virtual system from Mo-Sys. The broadcaster only had a small space to convert into a studio, Prater said, “but we wanted it to look big, to look luxurious,” he said. As part of the virtual set, talkRADIO installed Panasonic PTZ cameras and the Unreal Engine from Epic Games running on standard HP workstations. 

The system is combined with a preconfigured rack of switching, keying and the graphics power to sustain photorealistic virtual environments in real time. Using three tracked cameras—one on a rolling tripod, one on rails and one on a jib —customers can set up a variety of shots and scale up to 16 cameras. 

PARTY OF ONE

Beyond the new realities imposed by the pandemic, advanced visual storytelling remains a key goal for many newsroom systems. Vizrt’s Newsroom Solution Suite, a cross-platform newsroom content creation system, allows journalists to independently prepare, script, plan and create with graphics, video, stills, data visualizations and maps. With this system, one journalist can be a one-person production crew.

Journalists can scale and adjust the tools they need based on the volume of required output and the type of content needed for a specific platform, and can also create data-driven election graphics and submit breaking news stories and publish as needed to different platforms. 

That’s the simple reality: The pace of the news cycle has never been faster, said Daniel Nergard, president of Vizrt.

“Today’s journalists need to be able to create on multiple output formats, often at the same time, in order to reach and engage their audience,” he said. Nergard added that Newsroom Suite simplifies workflows and offers easier access to a comprehensive set of tools, making it so that journalists can focus on what matters most: Telling the story.

“Vizrt Newsroom allows journalists to scale and adjust the tools they need to the volume of required output and produce any type of content for any kind of show, program or platform,” said Gerhard Lang, CTO for Vizrt. “Content production teams can create anything from data-driven election graphics and breaking news stories, to social media aggregation, and republish and adapt to any combination of output needs.”

Using Vizrt Newsroom’s browser-based interfaces, journalists can plan, create and edit stories from either their newsroom, the road or from home. This feature proved vital during the early days of the pandemic. 

“During the pandemic we saw creative use of virtual technology not only from broadcasters but also the corporate world,” said Andre Torsvik, head of marketing strategy for Vizrt Group, referring to a corporate event organized by Janssen, an immunology company that saw its Covid-19 vaccine receive emergency use authorization in the U.S. in early 2021. 

The three-day corporate event took place using Vizrt virtual environments. The company used Viz Arc to control graphics and handle virtual camera transitions. All material was produced in the Amazon Web Services cloud and controlled from three international locations, Torsvik said.

“We have seen some brilliant work from our customers in leveraging software-based solutions to break through old hardware-based limitations,” he said.

Vizrt also recently released the Vizrt XR Extended Reality system, which gives journalists virtual, augmented, mixed and extended reality storytelling capabilities. Used in the studio or at a home location, the virtual set can be reset from one show to the next in a matter of minutes. A wall at home can serve as a blank canvas allowing for interaction between presenters and graphics objects. 

According to Nergard, the system is designed to make it easier to run immersive, extended reality shows. State-of-the-art camera tracking and AI keying technology create hyper-real, precise graphics. Virtual views, 3D camera flights and myriad analysis tools let the presenter break down a sporting event interactively, either by offering insights on a touchscreen or virtually inserted right on the wall.

You've seen him on CNN stalking around a virtual environment and interacting with graphical representations of the SCOTUS process, North Korean missiles or Royal Thai Navy SEAL divers. Tom Foreman has established much of the network's work beyond video, playing a key role in the development and use of an immersive, 3D virtual studio that takes viewers to space to study satellites, onto distant battlefields to promote understanding of dangerous conflicts and down deep into the data of presidential elections.

Foreman will be a keynote speaker at Government Video Expo 2018. He spoke with Managing Director of Content Paul McLane for Government Video.

Government Video: You've done a lot of work in broadcast news with technology you've described as "going beyond video." What exactly does that mean?

Tom Foreman: We now have tools that allow us to visualize concepts that previously were not visual. We can turn data, we can turn ideas, we can turn trends, into interactive, touchable graphics, with which we can tell a story that adds clarity to our understanding of an increasingly complex world.

Previously, there were economic trends, crime trends, security trends that were difficult to visualize. But if you can turn it into an environment that you can stand next to, it helps people, who are visual creatures, to see what we're talking about.

GV: How did you become involved with the virtual studio?

Foreman: Hurricane Katrina was the birth of a lot of this. I had a deep and long understanding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast from having worked there in traditional journalism — doing beautiful pictures, explanatory pictures and reports. And yet Katrina brought such a scope of disaster that no one picture could do it justice. Even a collection of pictures could not do it justice. You needed the giant view that we could bring through a graphic treatment. What we were using at the time was a giant wall-based projection of Google Earth, which I was controlling with a mouse in my hand, I was controlling it on set and we were flying in and out.

The real value, though, came from the combination of traditional on-the-ground reporting and photography video that supported it, then using this as a high-tech frame that let us add the meaning that said, "Okay, I just showed you a picture of a church halfway underwater. That matters because this is where that church is; and down the street is this school, and down the street is this government building, and over here is the streetcar line." It gave a context.

We did the same thing after the earthquake in Haiti. We were able to show, not only where the damage was, but by widening out and using some of these tools to show satellite images before and after, we were able to analyze road blockages and say why it was so hard for aid to get to people. The Army asked if they could get copies of our images, because they were having trouble figuring out how to get things to people, and our analysis with the satellite images worked for them.

GV: Why aren't more people doing this in such a visual world? Is it cost?

Foreman: I don't think it's cost, it's understanding. This is a very high-tech tool for a very traditional and old-fashioned process: storytelling. A lot of people mistakenly think that this is whiz-bang, it's all about amazing graphics and immersive graphics; that is not the case at all.

Almost everything we produce begins as simple paper-and-pen drawings on my desk, where our team gathers around, and we draw it; and as we draw it, we're saying, “What is the story? What is it we're trying to convey?”

I think one of the reasons people don't do it — or do it effectively — is they compartmentalize it. "Well, the graphics department will create this; and the show production team will create this; and we'll bring in a reporter at the last minute and plug them in." That absolutely does not work. You have to have the full team involved from beginning to end.

GV: Is there a risk that these tools could come to be used in place of live reporting, rather than to complement it?

Foreman: I don't think so, because everything we do is grounded in traditional journalism. Everything we do is grounded in finding actual facts. In fact, we steer away from doing it when we can get access that shows us what we want.

GV: You've used this technology for so many interesting projects. Are there two or three that particularly stand out?

Foreman: This has been tremendously helpful in giving a sense of scale, when we've dealt with natural disasters; in giving a sense of proximity, when we've dealt with war situations; and in helping us peek into places where we can't readily look.

As we've analyzed the North Korean missile and nuclear program, it's been tremendously useful to show exactly how much progress they're making — and what they still have not yet accomplished. Missiles involve almost incomprehensible distances and speed and force; this allows us to depict that.

In the search for the missing Malaysian airplane, this was an enormously useful tool. When you say to somebody "five thousand square miles of ocean," most people have no idea what that looks like. If somebody talks about something being 1,500 feet underwater, they don't really understand what that means either. We're able to depict that in ways that make sense.

GV: Look ahead five years, how is our experience of watching content going to change further?

Foreman: You see sports embracing this a little bit. Sports can do that in part because you're always talking about a very defined situation. The football field is this size, and there are two teams, and they play this long. Basketball, field hockey, arena, whatever.

We're going to see a lot more of this embraced, not just by news organizations but by anyone who's in the business of trying to tell a story. Because frankly the world we live in today is endlessly complex compared to the world we lived in 50 years ago. You can wake up in the morning and get an email from a friend in Indonesia, respond to a phone call from your office down the street, see photographs from a family member who's three time zones away, and search back 20 years for records of information that you might need that day. You are traveling time and space every minute, much more than we used to. That requires a new kind of understanding of that information.

We can't make our brains evolve that quickly, so what we have to do is have tools that allow our brains, as they are, to connect with this new reality.

GV: What about artificial intelligence, 4K, other technical areas?

Foreman: Willa Cather once wrote that art should simplify, that it's about simplifying ideas and making them understandable. All these technological things—the quality of video; the immersive nature of some of these systems—I think that's going to continue. The real secret here, for those who want to thrive in this environment, is to recognize them for just what they are: These are tools for a simple process of understanding. If you let it become about the tools, then it becomes more noise, more clutter that doesn't help you understand the world.

This world that we're going into is not for the faint of heart. There are huge challenges to making sure this technology serves us. But the rewards for doing that are absolutely immense.

Many years ago, when I was a very young person, I did a big, a big magic show with flying doves and floating ladies and fireballs and the whole thing. That has been enormously useful to me. The whole purpose of a magic show is knowing what's really going on, which can be incredibly complex. And yet remembering what the audience sees — and knowing you have to let them come along in the story, in a way that works for them — that's what we're doing here.

When I'm in the virtual environment, there is rarely a gesture or a step or a turn that is not carefully constrained by the technology that I'm surrounded by. Only if you do that properly does it appear real, in a virtual sense; and only then can the technology disappear and the understanding come through.

Key Takeaways

Who? Tom Foreman of CNN is a featured keynoter at Government Video Expo on Wednesday, Nov. 28, in the session "From the 'Situation Room' to the Thailand Caves — Today's Evolving Journalism”

Why? New technology is helping media professionals tell stories more effectively by leveraging "the one thing humans are really good at: visual interpretation."

Now What? Register now to meet and learn from CNN's Tom Foreman and other top speakers from PBS, The DC Visionaries, BundlAR, Creative Media Matters and more.

OTTAWA-Ross Video has announced the release of v18 of its OverDrive Automated Production Control (APC) platform.

Ross says v18 helps content creators better manage and reduce the complexity of audio, as well offer additional rundown information, greater customization of the user interface, Ross Virtual Solutions UX MOS support (for virtual studio/augmented reality applications), as well as new security updates.

A summary of the new features:

• Audio Variables – included in OverDrive Premium and optional modules for OverDrive Prime and OverDrive Express.
• QuickAudio Groups, an enhancement to the existing QuickAudio feature where users can group multiple sources into a single keyword.
• New UI customization – bigger, bolder and different colors. Users can now select different colors to represent elements in the rundown to match existing workflows making the transition to OverDrive even easier.
• Additional rundown information – users can now display more granular information about each shot in the rundown. This enables a simpler or more detailed display depending on the layout’s application (e.g. producer needs less technical information, but the director wants more detailed information.)
• New security updates and performance/security improvements for HTML5 MOS plugins.
• Ross Virtual Solutions (VS/AR) – UX MOS support

At the same time as shipping V18 of OverDrive, Ross is also releasing V5.1 of Caprica, which enables OverDrive to be used with a comprehensive range of third party production switchers.