A gold medal final lasts seconds. At Milano Cortina 2026, the short track speed skating final—in which Jordan Stolz and Femke Kok seemingly made short work of obliterating Olympic records—lasted just over half a minute. Britain, meanwhile, took a breathtaking gold in the mixed team snowboard cross by a narrow 0.43 seconds.

In this environment, when the starting gun fires, every framing decision must be locked in. As with all live sport broadcasting, the room for error is small, and there can be no second takes or resets to get a better shot. There’s a production risk that can’t be avoided; cameras can miss moments, angles can obstruct. While traditional broadcast innovation, like rail cameras and first-person view drones, has narrowed that risk and brought the viewer closer to the action, it still operates within a flat, fixed perspective.

How Volumetric Video is Changing Sports and Music
Volumetric video changes the capture model itself. By recording subjects from multiple viewpoints simultaneously, it preserves the spatial performance rather than committing to a single camera angle at the point of capture. Producers can then reposition the virtual camera in post-production, even if the final output is rendered in conventional 2D. The end result is a different relationship between time, perspective and editorial control.

This distinction matters in high-profile sporting arenas. Early deployments, most notably at Paris 2024, showed that volumetric replays could be successfully integrated into top level sports coverage. While often constrained to replay segments that required additional processing time, they showed clear editorial value.

Milano Cortina 2026 marked a further step forward for the technology. AI-powered replay systems built on volumetric capture delivered significantly improved visual fidelity, with some sequences approaching almost cinematic standards. The quality leap was immediately visible, signalling that volumetric workflows are evolving from experimental enhancements into credible broadcast tools.

The uneven pace of adoption across sectors, however, reflects differing priorities. In music and selective creative productions, volumetric capture has enabled directors to defer certain camera decisions until post-production. Artists from Radiohead to A$AP Rocky have captured music videos entirely volumetrically, demonstrating how the boundary between capture and creative decision-making can be collapsed, freeing the shot from being permanently defined on set.

Why Aren’t Blockbusters Keeping Up?
Cinema presents a much tougher challenge. Blockbuster filmmaking is deeply director-led. Framing decisions are deliberate and often central to narrative intent. Sets, lighting plans and blocking are constructed to be seen from specific angles. Volumetric capture fundamentally shifts this by decoupling capture from final framing.

The hesitation, therefore, is not primarily about technical feasibility, but about authorship and embedded workflows. Directors must reconsider how their control ebbs and flows in a spatial medium where perspective is programmable after the cameras stop rolling.

As a result, widespread volumetric capture of entire narrative features remains unlikely in the near term. More commonly, multi-view rigs are being integrated selectively into visual effects pipelines, where the flexibility they provide aligns with existing post-production processes. The technology’s strengths are tangible today, but they are being applied pragmatically rather than universally.

What Needs to Happen Next
Creative convention may shape adoption in cinema, but engineering constraints are still limiting deployment in broadcast. Live production environments require reliability under stress. It is one thing for volumetric workflows to work in controlled demonstrations, but another to scale them predictably.

Visual quality is typically the first compromise under real-time constraints. Techniques such as 4D Gaussian splatting can produce high-fidelity representations, but they introduce latency. Generating these models requires iterative learning processes that cannot be accelerated through forcefully adding in more parallel compute resources. Even emerging single-camera approaches struggle to scale effectively in multi-camera environments, which remain essential for full volumetric capture.

Bandwidth heightens the challenge. Uncompressed volumetric datasets are substantial, and even with compression, bitrates can still reach tens or hundreds of megabits per second. Distributing that at broadcast scale, particularly to large audiences or mobile devices, remains a complex challenge.

In short, the industry’s next breakthrough is unlikely to come from capture hardware alone, and will depend on mature, interoperable ecosystems for compression, transport and decoding of volumetric formats. That said, the direction of travel is clear. Just as first-person view drones and cloud-based production have altered expectations of live sports coverage, volumetric workflows point toward a future in which perspective is no longer permanently fixed at capture. In the near term, they will continue to operate within director-led 2D outputs, adding flexibility upstream without disrupting established viewing experiences. Over time, as delivery systems evolve and extended reality devices mature, the possibility of viewer-controlled viewpoints may move from demonstration to mainstream.

For now, volumetric video has flourished where the stakes are highest and the moments are unrepeatable. In the Olympic arena, where fractions of a second define history, preserving every possible perspective is vital.

With less than three weeks before the 2026 NAB Show, TV Tech Content Director recently spoke with Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen, CEO of Appear about the company's latest news and plans for Las Vegas.

TV Tech: Since Appear’s successful IPO in late 2025, how has the transition to a public company influenced your long-term R&D roadmap and where are you focusing your 2026 investment to build on your present momentum?
Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen: The IPO was an important milestone for Appear, not because it changes our R&D roadmap, but because it reinforced the momentum we have built and gives us even greater scope to accelerate. The successful IPO and our market momentum reflect customer confidence in our business, the market opportunity ahead of us, and the role Appear is playing as one of the real success stories in this sector. There is a great deal of positive energy around the company, both internally and externally, and that comes from the fact that customers are responding very strongly to our strategy, our innovation and the results we are helping them achieve.

For 2026, we are investing to build on that momentum in areas where we see the clearest customer demand and the strongest commercial opportunity. The common thread is bringing scale, performance and agility to live event production. Customers are increasingly looking for the flexibility to operate across hardware, software and cloud in hybrid environments, while maintaining the highest standards of reliability, latency and efficiency. This means continued development of our award-winning X Platform for the most demanding live production and contribution environments, expansion of our all-software-based VX to support hybrid and cloud-based workflows, and the delivery of X5, extending the application of our X Platform to a wider range of production use cases.

TVT: There is an industry-wide shift toward IP-based live production. How is Appear helping broadcasters bridge the gap between traditional SDI workflows and the "all-IP" future?
TBJ: The reality for most broadcasters is that this is not an overnight shift. They are managing a mix of legacy infrastructure, new IP investments and growing pressure to become more flexible and more efficient. Our role is to help them move at their chosen pace.

We help customers transition from SDI to IP in a way that preserves operational continuity, while opening the door to newer workflows based on standards such as ST 2110, alongside low-latency transport and processing technologies that support modern live production.

Our customers demand the flexibility to respond to the requirements of each event production. They value the features and performance density of the X Platform as their agile enabler to acquire, process, format convert, encode/decode and transport live video, audio and data in the most demanding scenarios.

TVT: Appear was selected to support NBC Sports for the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Milan Cortina. What specific technical challenges does a multivenue, high-stakes event like the Winter Games present for your X Platform compared to standard seasonal sports?
TBJ: An event like the Winter Olympics is different from seasonal sports in both scale and complexity. You are dealing with multiple venues, a very high concentration of simultaneous live feeds, a broader mix of production requirements, and a level of operational scrutiny that leaves no room for failure.

For NBC Sports, the challenge was not only transporting more content, but doing so with the quality, resilience and the timing precision expected of a global event of this scale. That includes supporting fibre and satellite contribution workflows, efficient bandwidth usage, high-quality video delivery including HDR, and the growing role of remote and distributed production across the enterprise.

The X Platform really stands out when it is faced with these types of high-density, high-stakes live environments, where customers need flexibility and scale as well as robustly proven performance for the most prestigious events.

TVT: You’ve said the YouTube partnership was driven by direct customer demand from a major European broadcaster. How are real-world customer requirements like that shaping and accelerating the X Platform roadmap, and what does YouTube SRT verification say about the growing role of low-latency, pro-grade IP delivery for both traditional distribution and direct-to-platform streaming?
TBJ: This is a very good example of how our roadmap is shaped in practice. The YouTube verification did not begin as a theoretical product exercise. It came directly from a major European broadcast platform that wanted Appear encoders to support its production pipeline. That customer requirement helped trigger the collaboration with YouTube and ultimately led to official verification of the X Platform for SRT live streaming.

For us, that is exactly how the best innovation happens. When a customer comes to us with a clear operational need, it validates the use case almost immediately and helps accelerate development in the right direction. In this case, it reinforced the importance of giving broadcasters and rights holders a seamless, resilient and low-latency way to deliver high-quality live content not only through traditional broadcast chains, but also directly to major digital platforms.

What the YouTube SRT verification shows is that professional-grade IP delivery is now firmly extending beyond traditional contribution and distribution. Broadcasters, sports organisations and production teams increasingly want one reliable, broadcast-quality workflow that can support linear, OTT, FAST and direct-to-platform delivery. That is exactly where the market is heading, and it is why customer-led developments like this are so important to the evolution of our solutions.

TVT: What will we see at Appear's booth at the NAB Show?
TBJ: At NAB, the conversation will no longer be about choosing between hardware and software, or between on-prem and cloud. It will be about combining these choices intelligently to create more scalable, more efficient and more future-ready live production workflows.

We will enable this by showcasing how Appear technology enables sports leagues, broadcasters, and service providers to address key industry trends and needs, including satellite-to-IP migration, scalable remote production (REMI), and hybrid edge-to-cloud operations. Appear will launch new advances across the X Platform, a high-capacity, ultra-dense, low-latency media processing and gateway platform for live contribution, production and distribution, alongside the commercial availability of the X5, which brings X Platform performance to smaller-scale live productions, delivering Appear quality and core capabilities in a compact, energy-efficient chassis.

At NAB our objective reflects our mission – working daily with customers and the industry to enable the future of live production through innovation and proven technology performance from Appear.

STAMFORD, Conn.—NBC Sports is reporting that the U.S. Women’s Hockey’s overtime victory on Feb. 19 over Canada was the most watched women’s hockey game on record, averaging 5.3 million viewers on USA Network and Peacock with the audience peaking at 7.7 million viewers in overtime.

Viewing totals for the full Winter Olympics are expected early this week.

NBCUniversal also reported that Alysa Liu’s gold-medal winning performance in the figure skating free skate, and the U.S. Women’s Hockey Team’s 2-1 overtime victory over Canada in the gold-medal game, produced the most-watched Winter Olympics weekday coverage since Feb. 17, 2014, averaging 26.7 million viewers for the live afternoon window (Milan Prime: 2-5 p.m. ET) and Primetime in Milan (8-11 p.m. ET/PT) across NBC, Peacock, NBCU Digital Platforms and Versant’s USA Network, according to preliminary Nielsen data and digital data from Adobe Analytics

Thursday Feb. 19 also marked the 14th consecutive day that NBCU’s Milan Cortina Winter Olympic audience has topped 20 million viewers, according to official Nielsen Big Data + Panel viewership and preliminary data from Nielsen, and digital data from Adobe Analytics.

Through Thursday, the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics is averaging 24.1 million viewers on NBC, Peacock, NBCUniversal Digital Platforms and Versant’s CNBC and USA Network – marking the most-watched Winter Games presentation at this point since the 2014 Sochi Olympics, according to official Nielsen Big Data + Panel viewership and preliminary data from Nielsen, and digital data from Adobe Analytics. Viewership is up 93% from the 2022 Beijing Olympics at this point (12.5 million).

MINNEAPOLIS—Stadium Sports Network chose Telycam Explore XE cameras for its coverage of the U.S. Curling Trials for the Winter Olympics in Italy.

Stadium Sports Network has its roots in the specialized systems-integration firm Curling Stadium, which focused on deploying streaming solutions in curling arenas. The success of those deployments led to requests for it to provide full production services for organizations such as USA Curling and the international governing body World Curling. Founder and CTO John Benton expanded the company into the full-service Stadium Sports Network to meet this growing demand.

Now serving an increasingly high-end clientele, Stadium Sports knew it would need to upgrade from its previous PTZ cameras. “World Curling and USA Curling distribute our feeds to premium buyers, such as [Canadian sports network] TSN and other international television channels, who then air it on linear TV,” Benton said. “We knew we needed to provide better quality for linear television, and that our existing PTZ cameras weren’t going to cut it.”

Benton wanted cameras with 1-inch sensors and the ability to handle the unique demands of capturing curling. This objective became even more important when Stadium Sports was contracted to produce the U.S. Curling Trials in South Dakota for NBC Sports in November 2025. The even—which would determine which teams would represent the United States at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics—was to be broadcast on USA Network and NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service.

“When we were working on the Olympic curling trials, it was crucial that the cameras could handle the lighting, exposure and focusing challenges of shooting on a 200-foot sheet of ice,” said Benton, a former Olympian himself. “There were cameras from the big broadcast brand names that could do it, but their high cost meant that purchasing them rather than renting them would make it difficult for us to offer our production services cost-competitively.”

Stadium Sports’ partner in Scotland, David Owen of Curling Stadium Europe, recommended Benton look at Telycam’s Explore series. Benton evaluated the Telycam Explore XE broadcast-class PTZ cameras. The cameras impressed him, and he purchased three Explore XE units for the upcoming production.

For the USA Curling event, Stadium Sports used the three Telycam Explore XE cameras as primary cameras. Two were positioned as overhead cameras hung on a truss above the ice, over scoring areas at each end known as “the house.” The third camera, referred to as the “slide camera,” was deployed on the field of play. All three cameras panned, tilted and zoomed throughout the matches.

The Telycam PTZ cameras output NDI HX3 streams, which were transported to the production room over a Ubiquiti network with 10 Gbps fiber connectivity. The production center housed four space-efficient operator stations: the main switcher system, running vMix software; two camera operator positions; and a graphics and audio station, featuring Singular Live HTML5 graphics and a Behringer X32 mixing console.

The upgrade to the new PTZ cameras delivered the quality gains Benton sought. “We couldn’t be happier with the Telycam Explore XE cameras,” he praised. “And more importantly, NBC Sports and Peacock were also very happy with the quality we produced.”

More information is available on the Telycam website.

STAMFORD, Conn.—NBCUniversal reported that the Milan Cortina Olympics Opening Ceremony Friday night averaged 21.4 million viewers on NBC and Peacock—up 34% from the Opening Ceremony from the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, according to preliminary data from Nielsen and digital data from Adobe Analytics.

With coverage live in the afternoon (“Milan Prime”) followed by a special primetime presentation, the Opening Ceremony audience of 21.4 million viewers on NBC and Peacock was nearly six million viewers larger than the Beijing Opening Ceremony (15.9 million), the network claimed.

“We are off to a strong start with Friday’s captivating Opening Ceremony highlighted by the historic cities, the scenic mountain areas, and the Parade of Athletes,” said Rick Cordella, President, NBC Sports. “The Opening Ceremony audience exceeded our expectations, and we can’t wait for the next two weeks of competition.”

NBC said the Opening Ceremony was “the most-streamed for any Winter Games,” averaging more than 3 million viewers. Led by Peacock, Milan Cortina Olympics streaming consumption across NBCUniversal platforms exceeded 700 million minutes through Friday—most ever for a Winter Games and 2.5 times greater than the 2022 Beijing Olympics through the comparable time frame.

NBC’s Peacock streaming service has grown significantly since the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, when it had approximately 13 million paid subscribers compared to approximately 41-42 million currently.

The Milan Olympics Opening Ceremony also delivered the highest search engagement rate ever for advertisers in an Olympics Opening Ceremony (summer or winter), up +63% vs. Beijing 2022 and up +26% vs. Paris 2024, the network said. The event also outpaced other premium TV properties - viewers were +97% more likely to search for brands who advertised in the Opening Ceremony than those in major league sports and +84% more likely to search vs. primetime TV, according to EDO, Linear, Primetime.

Official Nielsen Big Data + Panel viewership will be available on Tuesday.

The Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics promises to be momentous both on screen and behind the scenes, in terms of new technologies and the consumer viewing experience. As Team USA heads to Milan with high hopes for its strongest performance in decades, NBC, Peacock and Comcast are readying a host of new technology and viewing experiences that they hope will strengthen, if not reverse, challenges to their business models that have been years in the making.

Addressing those challenges is particularly important for Comcast NBCUniversal, which spent some $7.75 billion for the U.S. rights to the Olympics between 2022 and 2032 and another $3 billion to extend those rights through 2036.

“The Olympics in Paris proved the Olympics are back and remain an unrivaled media property,” NBC Sports President Rick Cordella said at a press event, where he noted that NBCUniversal had already sold out its ad inventory for the Winter Games. “We expect Milan…to carry on that legacy…[by] mimicking and building on” NBC’s successful strategy for the Paris Olympics, he said.

Stemming the Decline
How well Comcast and NBCUniversal deliver on that promise will have a major impact on both its traditional and newer streaming and digital businesses.

For its part, NBC is hoping to kick-start the celebration of its 100th anniversary this year by reversing recent Winter Olympics viewing declines. Average total audience hit a record low in 2022 of 11.4 million for the Beijing Winter Olympics, down from the average audience of 19.8 million that viewed the Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in 2018 and only a quarter of the 45.6 million who watched the opening ceremony of the Salt Lake City Games in 2002.

The Games will also be crucial for Versant, owner of NBCU’s recently spun-off cable networks. Both USA Network, which will focus on Team USA with “Enhanced 4K” Dolby Vision and Atmos feeds, and CNBC will carry Olympics programming.

Similarly, Peacock, which will stream every event of the Games—around 3,000 hours of Olympics coverage—will look to solidify its stature as a major source of sports programming while the streamer’s owner, Comcast, will use the Games to lure back pay TV subscribers and fend off increased competition from 5G wireless carriers by highlighting the cross-platform capabilities of its video platform and its fast, low-latency broadband network.

“We know that the customers who still have a pay TV service are, by and large, huge sports fans,” Vito Forlenza, vice president of sports and entertainment at Comcast, said. “So, we are really focusing on sports to showcase the technology we have. When you can blend linear TV and streaming together into a seamless experience, you’re offering something that is really hard to replicate on a streaming box or a fixed wireless connection.”

Building on Paris
With NBC offering primetime coverage hosted by high-profile on-air talent, Peacock streaming all the events from 16 sports over 17 days, USA Network focusing on Team USA with 4K visuals and enhanced audio, and massive amounts of additional content available on CNBC, NBCSN and various digital offerings, one of the key issues facing the NBC Sports is finding ways to engage and not overwhelm viewers.

A major part of that consumer experience will be new production technologies. “Our mantra has been to make the best seat in the house even better,” Molly Solomon, executive producer and president, NBC Olympics Production, said. “This is going to be the most technologically advanced Olympics we’ve ever presented.”

That will include more extensive use of data analytics, live drones and mics on many athletes. “We will have mics on the U.S. men’s and women’s hockey players for the first time, and on freestyle, freestyle skiers and snowboarders,” Solomon said. “If you are a fan of snowboarding, you will hear Maddie Mastro give herself a pep talk at the top of the pipe.”

Less obvious will be improvements to the successful comprehensive cross-platform programming and tech strategy that was used during the Paris Olympics to provide viewers with many ways to interact and personalize their viewing experiences on TV, mobile and desktop.

“Customers have told us directly, ‘I love the Olympics, but there is so much of it I get overwhelmed,’” Forlenza explained. “There are customers who want to watch just about anything and some that want to watch specific events. All of them want us to make it as easy for me to get to an event I want to watch as quickly as possible…It doesn’t matter if you are streaming 3,000 hours on Peacock, if they can’t find the minute or two that they really want to watch right now.”

On a high level, that imperative is reflected in a cross-platform programming and tech strategy that worked so well in Paris. As with the Summer Games, all events will be streamed on Peacock and USA’s 4K feeds will focus on Team USA, while the high-profile primetime and late-night programming on NBC will dive into the day’s biggest stories and events.

Alternative Angles
Tying this wide array of programming together will be several new and returning digital tools that will help viewers find content, interact with stories of interest and personalize their experience.

One notable new experience will be “Rinkside Live on Peacock,” where users of the streaming service can access new camera angles for live coverage and behind-the-scenes shots of ice hockey and figure skating via a coach’s cam, a bench cam and other features, said Solomon.

Another notable digital tool is OLI, the AI-powered Olympic Guide that debuted in Paris and has been significantly upgraded for the Milan-Cortina Games. “This AI concierge will make following the games easier and more personalized than ever,” Jenny Storms, chief marketing officer, NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, said. “It’s like having a friendly Olympics expert on call across 19 NBCUniversal websites and apps.”

The clearest expression of this cross-platform strategy of melding programming and tech to greatly improve viewer engagement will be found on the Comcast Xfinity platform.

As part of that effort, Xfinity will bring back and improve popular interactive features from the Paris Games like AI-powered highlights, as well as newer tools like Fan View, which brings together stats, personalized playlists, live scores, athlete profiles, advanced DVR capabilities and betting odds, and Multiview, which lets viewers watch up to four different feeds at the same time.

“We are able to blur the lines between traditional TV and streaming to the point where it doesn’t matter if your favorite event is on broadcast or streaming on Peacock,” Forlenza said. “We’ll have a full and seamless integration of Peacock into our Olympic experience and wrap it all together with tons of interactivity.”

“The core of our business is coupling video, broadband and mobile,” he concluded. “We will be bringing all of that together to provide an unsurpassed experience that others can’t offer and fixed wireless can’t support.”

Trying to get beyond all the hype you read about immersive sound, I spent several months preparing to listen to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing and Super Bowl LVI in immersive in my home in Decatur Ala. I confirmed that NBC Sports produced 5.1.4 Channel Immersive Sound, but it is still difficult to get immersive sound into the home.

In an ideal digital world, you would be able to hook up your digital antenna to an ATSC 3.0 tuner and receive a UHD video signal and immersive Dolby Atmos sound from your regional terrestrial television provider. I am about 35 miles from the antenna and have good terrestrial reception, but Huntsville Ala. is not an ATSC 3.0 market yet. There are nearly 50 markets in the United States that transmit ATSC 3.0 with Dolby Atmos as the immersive audio standard but no luck with my trusty digital antenna.

My Roku Ultra streaming device said it is capable of Dolby Atmos so I searched out satellite, cable and streaming services and continued my quest for immersive sound. NBC delivered 4K UHD with Dolby Atmos sound for the 2022 Winter Olympics coverage to customers through distribution partners including Comcast, Verizon, fuboTV, YouTubeTV and Prime. Comcast and Verizon did not offer service in my area and Direct was only interested in selling me their biggest package and no one could tell me if the Dish Hopper delivers immersive sound. With a $69 a month contract minimum, satellite or cable was out of the question for this experiment.

‘Sophisticated Handshaking’
While I searched for a service provider I spent half a year’s earnings from my TV Tech writing commission and bought a high-end Yamaha Soundbar with Dolby Atmos and 49 speakers firing in all directions. I hooked up my soundbar directly to my Roku Ultra and hooked the 4K output from the soundbar to my Sony 4K television. 

After 10 minutes of fiddling with menus and remotes I was able to get sound through the system. Although the sound was better than my Vizio surround sound soundbar, I was not convinced that I had immersive sound. Initially I was suspect of the HDMI interfaces and contacted Neal Roberts, senior manager, Broadcast Partnerships at Dolby Laboratories (Neal has since moved on to HBO Max).

Neal told me that regardless of the version of HDMI, consumers will always have audio and with later versions supporting more capabilities.

“The connection is controlled by the sophisticated handshaking between source and sync devices that HDMI supports,” Neal said. “This ranges from stereo at minimum, to 5.1 channels of decoded PCM audio, to an encoded DD+ bitstream that includes Dolby Atmos, to decoded audio and metadata [known as “MAT”]. For example, a new set-top box connected to a legacy soundbar/AVR might produce a stereo or a 5.1 channel surround sound experience, while that same HDMI signal connected to a newer soundbar or AVR would be capable of reproducing a Dolby Atmos experience.”

So it seems that it is possible to deliver immersive sound to the consumer, but I question the depth of immersive experience since it was difficult to hear much sound above me. 

The Right Sound for the Right Sports
Now is the time to consider the consumers and how-to best create an effective soundfield over soundbars. Up-firing soundbars need something to up-fire. Birds and aircraft belong in the height channel, but I question how much ambiance and atmosphere should be directed into the height channel. Clearly the most popular American sport—football—does not offer any sports sound that logically should be in the height channels except the PA and atmosphere.

However, there is a large reservoir of activities, such as many winter sports, that benefit from an aggressive vertical enhancement. For example, with ski jumping, simply by placing the last microphones on the jump in the height channels it gives a clear aural impression of lifting off. Elevating sounds is a significant aspect of immersive sound and sports struggles with what sounds should be elevated into the height channels. My upcoming book shares more than 50 case studies on immersive sound production for sports.

I think the 2022 Winter Olympics proved that the infrastructure for producing and delivering immersive sound is working itself out, but significantly I think audio producers must consider advanced immersive sound production practices and create an immersive sound experience beyond atmospheric embellishments.

In 2016, I presented the concept of “Front Soundfield Reinforcement” which coalesces the front vertical soundfield into a cohesive aural pallet. Contemporary immersive sound production is typically horizontal layers with a surround layer at ear level and another height layer with usually four channels of sound. If you contemplate vertical layers where the front left, right and the height channels collectively reinforce the front soundfield, then the concept of Front Soundfield Reinforcement seems like a logical solution for soundbar reproduction.

Basketball clearly demonstrates the benefits of Front Soundfield Reinforcement. Basketball uses a camera under each basket which visually has significant vertical dimension. By placing microphones by the net and on the floor and routing the net microphones into the height channels, the illusion of being under the basket is complete because the net sounds are heard above the listener.

When I reflect on the state of immersive sound production I accept that perhaps atmospheric embellishments are enough for the average sports consumer, but I think an enhanced and entertaining experience is necessary to engage an audience that seems to have lost its appetite for TV sports. Listen up. 

OTTAWA, Canada—In the runup to the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, CBC/Radio-Canada has announced that its coverage of the XXIV Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022 will run from Friday, February 4 to Sunday, February 20, 2022 and will feature 7 sports and 109 medal events across 13 competition venues.

That will include broadcasts from every venue, totaling more than 3500 hours of live content across all platforms. In addition, broadcast partners TSN, RDS and Sportsnet will offer live event coverage, providing multiple viewing options and CBC Sports and Radio-Canada Sports will be the digital homes to Beijing 2022, offering Olympic-themed content year-round. 

Digital platforms will allow Canadians to stay connected via the CBC Sports and Radio-Canada Sports websites, the CBC Sports and Radio-Canada Sports apps, the free CBC Gem and ICI TOU.TV streaming services, CBC/Radio-Canada said. 

More details on the coverage on various platforms are expected next month.  

“In a time of isolation and disconnection, few events have the power to rally people together like the Olympics. CBC/Radio-Canada is delighted to unite all Canadians in our athletes’ Olympic dreams at the Beijing Winter Olympics,” said Catherine Tait, president and CEO, CBC/Radio-Canada. 

“As Canada’s Olympic and Paralympic network, CBC/Radio-Canada is proud to bring Canadians unparalleled live and on-demand coverage of their favorite sports and athletes, as they go for gold in Beijing,” added François Messier, CBC/Radio-Canada’s Chef de Mission, Beijing 2022. “We’re looking forward to providing sports fans from coast to coast to coast with more award-winning Olympic coverage.”

STAMFORD, CONN.—Each time NBCOlympics presents coverage of the Olympics, it tasks its logistics and creative teams with designing studios that capture the essence of the country hosting the games, said Michael Sheehan, Coordinating Director for NBC Olympics.

Coverage of the just-concluded Winter Games from PyeongChang in South Korea, was no different. “There were so many large, impressive mountains in the region of PyeongChang that we developed our concept around that,” said Sheehan.

GEODESIC DOME CONCEPT

The concept for the set was a carved-out geodesic dome with the structure affixed to the raw stone of a mountain and a large window looking out upon the valley and mountains of PyeongChang. Central to the design was a massive LED video wall from Leyard, which created the window. “I think it was the largest display we’ve ever done on the Olympics,” said Sheehan.

The 43-foot-wide-by-13-foot-high video wall, which consisted of 196 individual Leyard TWS Series LED displays, served as a seamless canvas for the custom content created by NBC’s graphics team. However, feeding visuals to the wall took a bit of “head scratching,” said Sheehan. While the games were produced in 1080i, a video wall of this size required 4K content to avoid any appearance of stretching.

The solution was to playback 4K content created by NBC’s graphics staff from a ChyronHego Prime Graphics platform to a Barco E2 presentation system and ultimately onto the Leyard LED video wall.

Originating video in 4K to be displayed on this wall wasn’t a concern because nearly all of the content was graphically rendered. “This workflow worked perfectly for us,” Sheehan said, “from the graphics standpoint to the Chyron, to the Barco and to the displays inside the Leyard wall.”

[Read: NBC To Broadcast 2018 Winter Olympics Live Across U.S] 

However, a separate 16-foot-wide, 8-foot-high Leyard LED video wall consisting of 36 displays did display 1080i video. To be consistent with the overall look of the set, this wall was used as a scenic with “a fabrication” placed in front of the monitors that essentially cut off the edges of the overall display, according to Sheehan.

That meant there was a sweet spot for the video content displayed on the wall. “We were careful not to use content where really critical things were happening on the outside edge,” he said.

THREE SEPARATE LOOKS

At the back of the studio where the stone wall met the geodesic dome, three 4-foot-wide, 7-foot-high Leyard LED video walls hung from pipes so they could be easily moved and set up in different ways. This part of the studio served as NBCOlympics’ main interview area, where the network wanted to have a large, impressive look, he said.

“We set up three templates for use on these walls,” said Sheehan. One configuration had the three side-by-side to create a large display; another had two pushed together with a separation from the third; and still another separated all three for different types of content.

“The beauty of this approach was it gave us three separate looks in that area,” said Sheehan. “It made us look gigantic.”

“They [the LED video walls] were much larger than any monitor could possibly be,” he said. “We never even thought about going glass or plasma. We knew that would have to be LED and Leyard.”

One alternative could have been virtual sets and augmented reality, but that option was never given much serious consideration. “I tend to gravitate towards organic scenery,” said Sheehan. “I’m not really big into augmented reality with the exception of it being a secondary support.”

There is a lot of value in having talent sitting at real desks and stand in front of real things, he said. “I want the crew and people to walk into an actual environment and fall in love with it and be a part of that environment for the entire time.”

One of the first uses NBC made of this LED display technology was about four years ago when it built its “Football Night in America” studio in Stamford, Conn., he said. “There has been a consistency of this technology [since that first use] and out of the box it goes together and works.”

Having confidence the LED walls are reliable and will deliver the quality and high resolution needed for an event watched by so many people is a real comfort, especially given the hectic setup and size of a project like covering the Olympics, Sheehan said.

“We do the biggest television show in the world from an area that was a year ago a parking lot,” he said Sheehan. “We need to be sure there is reliability.”

TOKYO—Athletes aren’t the only ones who made their way to PyegonChang for the 2018 Winter Olympics, For-A is on site providing broadcasters with gear to help support 4K production. For-A video and routing switchers, multiviewer and video conversion technologies are being used by broadcasters from the U.S., Japan and Korea for their 4K coverage.

FRC-9000

One of the For-A products in use is the FRC-9000 frame rate converter. The unit features 4K/3G/HD/SD multi-format support and conversion with motion compensation processing, can be upgraded to dual channel conversion in 3G/HD-SDI and store up to two Dolby E encoder/decoder optional modules.

[For all our Olympics coverage, visit here.] 

Other products in PyeongChang include the HVS-490 and HVS-2000 video switchers. The HVS-490 is suitable for mobile production and live event venues. The HVS-2000 features MELite, which allows a traditional AUX bus to transform into a functional M/E with cut, mix, wipe and key control; FLEXaKEY, which enables operators to tailor their production needs by adding and moving key and DVE layers.

For-A has also provided its USF-1044UDC 4K up/down/cross converter, MFR-8000 routing switcher, MV-4210 multiviewer, ESG-8000 8K/4K/HD test signal generator and DSK-400 4K/HD keyer.

MALDEN, MASS.—NBC Olympics and its parent company Comcast have been touting that the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, are the first games to support 4K/HDR broadcast. While that is true, Ars Technica took a deeper dive into just what it will take for fans to watch the Games in 4K/HDR; the results indicate that it may need an Olympic effort of its own. Only Comcast, DirecTV and DISH are providing 4K/HDR broadcasts, but none are live, only Comcast offers it on-demand, specific hardware is required and only a handful of sports are even available.

For the full story, read Ars Technica’s original article.

NEW YORK—The PyeongChang Winter Olympics are finally here.

NBC began its primetime coverage of the Winter Games on Feb. 8 with figure skating and freestyle skiing and then Feb. 9 with the Opening Ceremony. Coverage starts for both at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT.

Over the course of the games, the network will air 176 hours of programming. Sister cable network NBCSN will broadcast 369 hours with CNBC airing 46 hours and USA Network 40.5 hours.

Not near a TV? No problem.

NBC Olympics has you covered, offering 1,800 hours of live streaming coverage as well as enhanced options for alpine skiing and figure skating. Fans can tune into NBCOlympics.com, the NBC Sports app, the NBC Sports Scores app, Snapchat and Uber for the latest on their favorite sports.

NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports app provided live coverage of the Opening Cermony at 6 a.m. ET for those who didn't want to wait until primetime.

NBC is allowing first-time visitors to stream 30 minutes of coverage before having to authenticate. Afterward, visitors get 5 minutes before having to authenticate.

Still need more ways to watch?

PyeongChang is the first Winter Games available for streaming via connected TVs. Users of Amazon Fire, Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku, Win10, Comcast X1 and select Samsung authenticated pay TV customers will all be able to stream.

This story first appeared on TVT's sister publication B&C. 

EL SEGUNDO, CALIF.—Subscribers of AT&T/DirecTV have much to choose from when it comes to NBCU’s coverage of the Winter Olympics from PyeongChang, including 4K HDR coverage with Dolby ATMOS sound and an interactive Mix Channel offering four NBCU networks at once, the company has announced.

DirecTV (Channels 205 and 600) and U-Verse TV (Channels 94, 1094, 637, and 1637) will offer a 4-in-1 Mix Channel to watch multiple broadcasts simultaneously, including those of NBC, NBCSN, CNBC and USA Network, the company said.

[DISH to Deliver NBCU 4K HDR Winter Olympics Coverage] 

Coverage begins Feb. 9 on DirecTV Channel 106, and for those wishing to watch on their mobile devices, DirecTV Now subscribers will be able to view four live NBCU streams, including the 46 NBC affiliates. DirecTV and U-Verse TV subscribers will have access to more than 1,800 hours of live streaming digital-only content via NBCOlympics.com.

AT&T/DIRECTV has published a blog with more coverage details.

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA—Hearst Television crews are in place in South Korea to provide its NBCU local affiliates with live cut-ins and recorded segments during their morning newscasts. In all, the station group has sent nine people to South Korea, including three two-person field crews made up of a photographer and reporter, two producers and an engineer/IT specialist.

Hearst TV tests of TVU One from South Korea.

While NBCU retains all rights to distribute Winter Olympics Games and ceremonies in the United States, the Hearst TV crews will focus mainly on the U.S. athletes who live in or near markets where the station group owns NBC affiliates, said Larry Vancini, manager of broadcast IT for the group. “We’re doing a few for WPTZ-TV, our NBC affiliate in Plattsburgh, N.Y., for example,” he said. There are several Winter Olympics connections for WPTZ. In December 2017, U.S. biathlete Leif Nordgren married WPTZ meteorologist Caitlin Napoleoni. Other U.S. Olympic athletes from the area include skeleton racer John Daly and cross-country skier Ida Sargent.

The crews also may cover stories about South Korea, such as the nation’s new bullet train connecting Seoul to the PyeongChang mountain Winter Olympics venue, he said during a telephone interview from Seoul.

Hearst TV is splitting its resources between the coastal city of Gangneung where events like hockey, speed skating and curling will take place and PyeongChang, which will be the site of various skiing and snowboarding events, he said.

“Right now the workspace is set up in the coastal cluster where our live position is,” said Vancini. There the station group will use a TVU Networks Transceiver to share live and recorded content with its 11 NBC affiliates via the TVU Grid. The crews will also provide content to its NBC affiliates for their local Ozone shows, which combine content from the Hearst TV crews with that of the network, he said. 

At the PyeongChang venue and elsewhere around the peninsula, the Hearst TV crews will rely on a TVU One portable streaming solution for contribution. Hearst TV is renting the unit rather than taking its own TVUPacks to South Korea, he added. “The TVU One is so much smaller and lighter [than the first generation TVUPack],” said Vancini. “That’s important to our crews that have to carry a camera, batteries and other equipment.” (The TVU One weighs 2.2 pounds and measures about 7.5 inches high by 4.75 inches wide by 2.75 inches deep.)

“TVU paired the TVU One with four wireless modems from South Korea’s wireless carriers,” he said. Despite South Korea’s mountainous terrain, the unit has provide a robust connection and performed well during testing. “I fired it up and did some testing yesterday (Feb. 2 in South Korea), and all of the air cards had great signal,” he said.

South Korea’s wireless infrastructure has been a pleasant surprise, said Vancini. “There’s not been a single place I’ve been where I haven’t been able to connect with my phone and get good throughput,” he said.

Hearst TV will rely on a combination of Wi-Fi, wired Ethernet and wireless cell service and temporary TVU hotspots if needed to contribute live and edited stories to group stations from South Korea, he added.

The setup will allow the crews to deliver live shots to its stations with only about one second of latency. IFB will be handled through the group’s news bureau in Washington, D.C., in combination with the mobile phones of the field crews. IFB latency is about 1/10 of a second, Vancini added.

“These backpacks make it so much easier for a crew to go out and cover something without having a big live truck or satellite truck,” he said. “I call it the right tool for the right job.”

SHENZHEN, CHINA—Don’t expect to see DJI at the 2018 Winter Olympics; the drone manufacturer has updated software in its drones to make Olympic venues in PyeongChang, South Korea, and other locations temporary no-fly zones throughout the Games.

The creation of these no-fly zones is an effort to reduce any potential safety or security concerns. The coordinates of the no-fly zones were set based on aviation authorities suggested distances. Officially, there will be no-fly zones in PyeongChang, Gangneung, Bongpyeong and Jeongseon in Gangwon Province.

DJI has previously set-up no-fly zones during major events like the national political conventions in the U.S., the G7 Summit in Japan and the Euro 2016 football tournament in France.

The 2018 Winter Olympics will take place from Feb. 8-25 in PyeongChang.

STAMFORD, CONN.—The Olympics may be taking place in South Korea, but customized content of the Winter Games will make its way to New York, Chicago and Philadelphia courtesy of NBC Olympics and Intersection, a smart cities technology and media company. The duo will be share Olympics content across digital screens in all three cities throughout the two weeks of the Games.

 [NBCU to Deliver 2,400 Hours of Winter Olympics Coverage]

The content is being created specifically for Intersection’s urban network of digital screens. Morning highlights, primetime previews, and Opening Ceremony teaser, medal counts, real-time alerts, athlete profiles and more will be made available across Intersection’s LinkNYC network in New York; digital urban panels and platform displays in the Chicago Transit Authority; and digital bus shelters, urban panels and platform displays throughout SEPTA, PATCO and the streets of Philadelphia.

[Live From PyeongChang] 

The 2018 Winter Olympics will take place from Feb. 8-25 in PyeongChang, South Korea.

PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA—The Olympics moment is here for RTW, as the company has announced that it has supplied Broadcast Network Connections GmbH with a number of TM3-3G Smart TouchMonitors for the International Broadcast Centre editing suites during the 2018 Winter Olympics.

RTW’s TouchMonitor TM3-3GS is equipped with all available software licenses for metering, deembedding and monitoring of 3G-SDI audio signals. The monitors have a 4.3-inch touch screen and a flexible user interface for preset selection and setting the monitoring level. With its integrated 3G-SDI demebedder interface, the TM3-3GS displays level and loudness of any eight 3G-SDI audio channels. In addition, up to 16 SDI audio signals can be sent to eight AES3 outputs.

The implementation of RTW’s TM3-3GS TouchMonitors is part of BNC’s efforts to boost its mobile editing suites capacity. The company is expected to use the TM3-3GS units for ski tournaments, Formula 1 races, cultural events and political coverage.

PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA—Beyond athletic achievements, the XXIII Winter Games will hopefully be remembered for having North and South Korea delegations marching into the Olympic Stadium under a unified flag, and the fielding of a mixed North and South Korean Women’s ice hockey team.

The XXIII Winter Olympic Games will take place in PyeongChang, South Korea, Feb. 9-25

For NBC’s veteran production team, the run-up to the Games has been a busy, but manageable period where everything that had to get done was getting done, on and sometimes even ahead of schedule.

And that’s important given the task at hand.

NBC Broadcast Network was poised to begin its 176 hours of coverage on the night before the Opening Ceremony. That, of course, is only part of the story in today’s media environment. NBCUniversal will present more than 2,400 hours of coverage by the end of the Games across NBC, NBCSN, CNBC, USA Network, NBCOlympics.com, and the NBC Sports app. That’s the most hours ever for a Winter Olympics.

Notably, NBC will present Olympic primetime coverage live across all time zones—also a Winter Olympics first.

David Mazza, CTO & senior vice president Sports and Olympics, has worked 15 Olympic Games starting with Los Angeles in 1984 and was quick to praise the South Koreans in their preparation for the Games. “The country itself just works, and it works well,” he said. “The construction, the power, the technology, the people’s understanding of technology… all of this has made our setup easier than it has been for many years.” 

WELL PREPARED

One particular challenge to this Games has been the weather. It’s not storms or tides that wash out a studio as in Rio, or deep snow—it’s just a bitter cold that does not stop. “I’ve worked in some cold climates, but none as consistently cold as here,” Mazza said. “It can be –30 degrees with wind chill in the mornings!”

Another factor that has made a difference is the use by host broadcaster Olympic Broadcasting Services of a pre-fabricated system for the International Broadcast Centre, home to broadcasters covering the Games. This was well-received in Rio and here as well.

This meant that as soon as the team arrived they could immediately start all of the work and all of the cabling, which is not typical, noted Terry Adams, vice president, IBC Engineering, NBC Olympics, working his 11th Games. “[In previous Games], we typically had to spend a month or more dealing with cable trays and powering and construction,” he said. “But this time when we arrived in Korea on Oct. 20, they could just get right to work.”

Mazza said the crew was actually 2-2½ weeks ahead of schedule by the time they went home for Christmas.

Beyond the assists from the host and the host broadcaster, NBC has also been refining its between-Games processes, and this is bearing fruit.

In the “short” 16-17 month break between the closing ceremonies in Rio and the PyeongChang Opening Ceremony, the IBC infrastructure RIBs (racks-in-a-box) were returned to Stamford, Conn., home of the NBC Sports Group complex. Here, the team had space and time to lay out the entire system, connect it and test it.

“Our configuration time has now exceeded our wiring time,” said Mazza. “We used to get on site and spend a lot of time wiring before it could be configured… now between the fiber deployment and the increased complexity of the configuration, it’s the other way around.”

This means that everything has to get preconfigured in the pre-fab before shipping. When the team arrived all they had to do was run all the fiber—which is pretty quick—and about 90 percent of the configuration was done.

Setting and configuring the system in Stamford had benefits beyond a fast setup once on-site. While in Stamford, the IBC racks could be connected to Stamford with short fiber runs for configuration mock-ups.

“Not to oversimply it, but that short piece of fiber just extended to 5,000 miles when we got here,” said Terry Adams, vice president IBC Engineering, NBC Olympics, working his 11th Games.

Getting so much done in Stamford also allowed for extensive size and scope modelling, particularly for the asset management systems and edit systems so crucial for all the remote production that has become standard. 

“We didn’t have to wait to plug in the actual circuits to mock up hundreds of users and workflows, so we have greater confidence than ever before in the stability of the system,” said Darryl Jefferson, vice president Post and Digital Workflow, NBC Sports & Olympics, a relative “newcomer” with six Olympic Games under his belt. “We’ve had challenges in the past with size and scope, so we put a lot of energy into stability and fine tuning some features such as being able to put in more logs from more places, and more integration with data sources,” he said.

A birds-eye view of NBC Olympics’ primetime studio

The benefits of the pre-integration (and the broader remote production design) also rippled in to the venue systems deployed in South Korea more than in past Olympics.

“All of the pre-integration that we did in Stamford allowed us to do proofs-of-concept for the remote production we’re doing between venues and the IBC and for venue-to-venue efforts,” said Chip Adams, vice president, Venue Engineering, NBC Olympics, who is on his 13th Games.

In PyeongChang the pre-work has been particularly helpful, as the “field shop” where the venue equipment is typically configured and loaded onto trucks that can access the venues is about two hours away from the Olympic city, where the IBC is located.

“This was the other rationale for putting the systems all together in Stamford—containerizing them for easy shipping and deployment, and laying out every IP address for the configuration before they go in to the box,” said Chip Adams.

Jefferson said that one of the other curve balls that has become increasingly important is cyber security. “We’ve had to patch and repatch and triple patch every piece of gear based on whatever is happening out there in the big, bad world,” he said. “It’s a lot of Microsoft updates and security updates.” 

@HOME KEEPS GROWING

Although it has roots going all the way back to the Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta, where rooms at 30 Rock in New York connected to the Atlanta IBC via T1 lines, the @home remote production effort really started to come into its own in Torino in 2004 and more fully in Beijing by 2008.

The PyeongChang NBC production will have seven control rooms located in Stamford, up from just two in Sochi. Errol Foremaster, vice president, engineering operations and planning, NBC Olympics, who is working his 13th Games, said these control rooms were largely feeding the tonnage of cable hours across several NBC properties, with the network shows coming out of South Korea.

Foremaster said that because of the time difference (14 hours between Korea and EST) almost everything would be shown live in the U.S. Other than the overnight period in Korea when nothing new is happening, there will generally be live content on an NBC platform, often the broadcast.

“Part of the preparation and production challenge is related to the time differences, and keeping straight where we are with live content,” said Foremaster. “With today’s technology and society, live is just expected.”

NBC will have more live streaming from more sources than ever before at a Winter Games, and this will be the first Olympics where Opening Ceremonies will be streamed live to the states on all platforms.

NBC is also offering more course animations, more slo-mos and more ISO cameras as ancillary stream sources available to the general public.

“Enhanced streaming,” is new and available from a few PyeongChang venues. This service is for connected TV customers, and might typically consist of a double box screen, where one screen is the host feed and a second is an ISO camera, with stats or other content displayed outside those sources.

CONNECTIVITY

NBC Olympics is relying on 108 HD feeds from Korea, with 32 returns. Most feeds will go home twice, once in a streaming copy and once in a broadcast/cable copy.

The infrastructure for this is four 10 GB highly redundant paths provided by AT&T. Two of these are dedicated mostly to video and two are dedicated to IP streaming and command and control. About 2 percent of the video is also on satellite as extra back-up.

Connectivity and remote production does not have to be intercontinental. One trend on the upswing in South Korea is increased venue-to-venue connectivity and venue-to-IBC connectivity, all to aid cost-effective production.

An example is Slalom and Giant Slalom. These venues have 36 feeds (and four returns) connected to the Downhill venue which is located about an hour away, so one truck can manage the production. “For the first time we have a 10GB connection between venues, in order to consolidate the number of trucks,” said Chip Adams.

A similar situation is happening at ski jumping, but that venue has 12 feeds connected directly to “Control X” in the IBC. That same control room will receive 36 feeds from the Closing Ceremonies, which will be cut in the IBC.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Production for social media outlets is growing, and integrated into the effort. Of particular note this year is a partnership with BuzzFeed, which produces the NBC presence on Snapchat. BuzzFeed has studio space in South Korea, and field crews as well. NBCUniversal has an interest in BuzzFeed and Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc. NBC Olympics is also working with Vox Media on a new Games-themed podcast called “The Podium.”

SPECIALTY CAMERAS, HDR & VR

Chip Adams said the biggest change coming in high-speed and specialty cameras is the sheer number of units. “We are going to have six 6x cameras, and the host broadcaster has something like 44 super slo-mo cameras of various types,” he said. “They’ve also deployed 133 mini cams, 14 cable cams and 11 rail cams across the venues.”

It’s less about new technologies in specialty cameras and more about the expectation that more and more will be deployed, said Chip Adams.

Virtual reality coverage is intriguing and growing, if still finding its niche. OBS has several venues with 180 degree camera rigs and they are offering a line cut and the individual cameras to rightsholders. Unlike Rio, the content will not be on a one-day delay. 

NBC’s VR coverage is greatly expanded from Rio, with more than 50 hours of live virtual reality coverage powered by Intel True VR, available to authenticated users with Windows Mixed Reality headsets, Samsung Gear VR, and both Google Cardboard and Google Daydream, with compatible iOS or Android devices via the NBC Sports VR app. This is the first time VR is available from a Winter Olympics and the first time Olympic VR programming will be live in the U.S. on a wide range of devices and platforms.

Comcast is sponsoring a technology demonstration of 4K HDR and ATMOS sound from Korea that is a substantial increase from the small trial done from Rio. The next-day delay channel will offer 6-12 hours daily. This increase is due to an expanded effort from the host and particularly Japan’s NHK, which is producing a good amount of 8K with HDR content from Korea.

NHK is providing NBC with a downconverted feed of their 8K HDR coverage, and OBS’s 4K SDR coverage from hockey will be “stretched” up to HDR. There are two 4K feeds from PyeongChang to SPOC (Sports Production Operations Center in Stamford) and one return. In SPOC, a small production team in a 4K mobile unit, two Off-Tube commentary booths and multiple sets of announcers are creating the voiceover for this coverage. This will be fed as linear and VOD content to Comcast and any other MVPDs who have signed up. 

Those 4K HDR signals in Stamford are relying on an Evertz IP routing system, which is also supporting much of the @home live broadcast, as well as digital production products like enhanced streaming.

“New for these Games, we have increased our IP routing capability to accommodate 4K HDR signals between South Korea and Stamford, as well as providing 4K HDR signals to our Off-Tube announce booths, the 4K truck, and our distribution point in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,” said Tim Canary, vice president, engineering Stamford & @home, who is on his 10th Games. 

THE HARDWARE

So much of the hardware and software that supports the crew’s effort changes only slightly from year to year. Sony continues to be NBC’s biggest Olympic supplier, with studio cameras, high-speed cameras, OLED monitors, production switchers and more throughout the IBC and venues. “Also the service and integration teams who have been doing this for years are really key,” said Mazza.

Canon’s lenses, and its service team, are at the tip of the production chain. Harmonic spinning disks are central for a lot of the ingest, the MAM and the Highlights Factory clip production, and EVS servers and software also remain firmly entrenched in the workflow. Avid craft editing and Grass Valley glue and infrastructure are contributing heavily as well.

Mobile units—some of which were delayed due to heavy weather—are from Game Creek and NEP. The latter has a history with NBC that goes all the way back to the last time South Korea hosted an Olympic Games, in Seoul in 1988.

PEOPLE POWER

Past experience is something that cannot be understated when it comes to evolving the production over decades and just getting the current job done, according to Mazza. The six staffers quoted in this article have worked an amazing 68 Olympic Games.

And those six point to Senior Core Engineer Chris Jorgensen as the smartest engineer and foremost problem solver on staff. He’s done eleven Games.

“We could not have done all these Olympics without his expertise,” said Mazza. “Whenever we can’t solve a problem on anything from plumbing to physics to power or air conditioning, he comes up with a solution.”

Mazza added that about 85 percent of the freelancers on staff for the big broadcast are Olympic veterans as well, and this travelling road show shows up every two years and gets the job done.

“We could never hit the level of content complexity and output without coming in to it with all this experience,” said Mazza. “It’s been a long, evolutionary journey and we couldn’t be at the level we’re at without the series of successes and some failures along the way.”

STAMFORD, CONN.—Making its Olympic debut at February’s XXIII Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea, is the distribution of 4K HDR to cable, satellite and telco providers, NBC Olympics announced in a press release. Xfinity will serve as the presenting sponsor of NBC’s 4K HDR coverage.

NBC Olympics said that this is the first offering of Olympic coverage in 4K HDR in the U.S. NBC Olympics provided 4K coverage for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janerio, but that coverage was distributed in 4K UHD.

The 4K HDR coverage will be provided by Olympic Broadcasting Services and Japan’s NHK. NBC Olympics will then distribute the content to U.S. distribution partners, who will make their own decisions on how they will make the content available to their customers.

Events at the 2018 Winter Olympics that will include 4K coverage are the Opening Ceremony, hockey, figure skating, short track speed skating, ski jumping and snowboard big air competitions. The 4K HDR coverage will be made available on a delay. Up to four events from the previous day’s competition will be provided daily from Feb. 9 through Feb. 26.

NBC’s coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics will take place from Feb. 8-25.

STAMFORD, CONN.—Break out the VR headsets and fire up the virtual reality app. The Winter Olympics are right around the corner and NBC Olympics plans more than 50 hours of live virtual reality coverage.

Powered by Intel True VR, the live coverage of the XXIII Olympic Winter Games from PyeongChang, South Korea, will be available to authenticated viewers with Windows Mixed Reality headsets, Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream with compatible iOS and Android devices, NBC Olympics announced Tuesday.

Intel True VR technology relies on pods at each event to create interactive 360-degree VR environments. Authenticated VR viewers can access that content via the NBC Sports VR app. Once in the VR environment, they can change their vantage points, listen to natural sound captured at each camera location, look at real-time stats and leaderboards, and view post-event results. They also can fly through the VR Olympic world, tour Winter Games venues and visit different parts of the Korean peninsula, NBC Olympics said.

According to the network, this year’s games mark the first time VR has ever been available for Winter Olympic coverage. Olympic Broadcasting Services will supply NBC Olympics with the live VR programming.

Live VR coverage will include the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, alpine skiing, curling, snowboarding, skeleton, figure skating, short track, ski jumping, ice hockey and big air.

Besides the live VR coverage, NBC Olympics will provide VR replays of all previously live-streamed events, a daily 360-degree video of a sport not available in VR the previous day and packaged daily highlights from the day before. VR viewers will also have access to content prior to the beginning of the Winter Olympics.

Programming will be available every day of the Winter Olympics (Feb. 9-25), except for Feb. 18.

NBC Sports first used VR for coverage of the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2016. 

STAMFORD, CONN.—NBCU will offer viewers more than 2,400 hours of coverage of the XXIII Olympic Winter Games from Pyeongchang, South Korea –the most ever of a Winter Olympics, the network announced today.

The Games also will be the first time the network has presented primetime live coverage of a Winter Olympics live across all time zones, it said. Coverage will be available on NBC, NBCSN, CNBC, USA Network, NBCOlympics.com and via the NBC Sports app.

The 2,400 hours of coverage from Pyeongchang will exceed the hours of coverage of the Winter Games from Sochi and Vancouver combined, the network said. Across the NBCU platforms, coverage will include: NBC with 176 hours; NBCSN with 369; CNBC with 46; USA Network with 40.5 and NBCOlympics/NBC Sports app with more than 1,800.

The combined 631.5 hours of linear coverage across four networks is the most ever for the Winter Games, NBC said.

Coverage begins Feb. 7, 2018, at 11 p.m. ET on NBCSN with mixed doubles curling. Streaming on NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports app will begin at 7 .m. ET on Feb. 7 for authenticated viewers, the network said. Primetime coverage begins the next day with live figure skating, qualifying for the men’s and women’s moguls competition and qualifying for the men’s ski jumping competition.

Over the 19 days of coverage (Feb. 7-25) NBCU will average more than 126 hours of coverage per day, about three times as many hours as coverage of the 1976 Innsbruck Winter Olympics on ABC, the network said.

NBCU also has partnered with the International Olympic Committee and the U.S. Olympic Committee to present 24/7 news coverage Feb. 10-24 on Olympic Channel: Home of Team USA, the network said. OBS will provide 20 hours of news and highlights, medal ceremony coverage and a daily studio show for the news channel.

STAMFORD, CONN.—The countdown is on for the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, with NBCUniversal planning celebratory announcements and coverage across its broadcast and digital platforms.

Set to begin one year from today, Feb. 8, NBCUniversal is ushering in the 2018 Winter Olympics with a consumer engagement “road-block” that consists of a 60-second promo narrated by “This is Us” actor Milo Ventimiglia. NBC will air the promo across its broadcast and cable networks, its websites, and social media.

In addition, NBC Sports Group will have exclusive coverage across its broadcast, digital and social media platforms. This will include stories on Winter Olympic athletes, pictures, graphics and airing of the “road-block.”

NBC News will also contribute some special reports, including interviews with Winter Olympic athletes and reports from PyeongChang.

The XXIII Winter Olympics in PyeongChang will take place from Feb. 8-25.