NEW YORK —New York Festivals International Television & Film Awards will honor David Mazza, senior vice president and chief technology officer for NBC Sports Group, with its 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award.
He will be recognized April 8 at the New York Festivals International Television & Film Awards ceremony at the NAB Show in Las Vegas.
“I’m humbled by this honor, but the credit really is shared with the incredibly talented team that I am blessed with, and the leaders at NBC who trusted all of us to venture into some very new and exciting territories,” Mazza said.
Mazza joined NBC in 1994 for the Atlanta Games in 1996. He was named senior vice president of engineering for NBC’s Olympics division in 2002 and chief technology officer in 2012. He oversees the engineering group, who were originally charged with designing and building NBC’s reuseable multigames infrastructure.
Starting in 2011, he was also tasked with building a new home for the NBC Sports Group in Stamford, Conn. He served as the lead designer and project manager for the international broadcast center.
Previously, Mazza was a technical director for the first four Olympics he worked on, from 1984-1992. When he joined NBC full-time in 1994 as director of engineering, Mazza led the technical design, building and operation of NBC’s International Broadcast Center for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. He and his team developed new technology and systems needed for the “Virtual IBC,” which enabled part of the broadcast center to be located in New York and part in Atlanta.
Other NBC Olympic engineering achievements have included designing for a three-fold increase in coverage hours from the Athens Games in 2004; the conversion to HD coverage and 5.1 Surround Sound for the 2006 Torino Games; the development of the “at-home effort” and the new File-Based Highlights Factory called for another three-fold increase in coverage, plus all the NBC Digital web content offered first for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. For the London Olympics, every competition was live streamed and they also offered tablet and mobile coverage.
Mazza’s other projects included 13 Championships at Wimbledon; three Super Bowls; 14 seasons of Championship Boxing on HBO; 10 seasons of NHL’s Stanley Cup Playoffs and Finals, the first three MTV Video Music Awards, and a long list of others. He has earned numerous awards including 22 Emmys for the Olympics (1984-2012), cable’s Monitor Award, ACE and BDA Awards for Graphics Compositing. In 2006, he was awarded the GE Edison Award for technical innovation.
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August 16 2013, “NBC Opens State-of-The-Art Sports HQ”
NBC Opens State-of-The-Art Sports HQ The network assembled a team of its best and brightest and gave them the Herculean task of designing and building a new facility in less than two years, all while planning and covering the London Olympics during the project. The original goal was to consolidate two local facilities, bringing local Comcast and NBC Sports together under one roof. The plan eventually grew to encompass bringing nearly all of the NBC Sports organization under one roof.
