NBC Sports is celebrating what it calls “Legendary February,” hosting three marquee sporting events expected to attract record viewership. The action begins with the opening ceremony from Milan, Italy, when the XXV Winter Olympic Games commence on Feb. 6. Two days later, the network will air the Super Bowl and, a week later, the NBA All-Star Game.
Planning for such a confluence of events isn’t easy, but NBC Sports has plenty of experience in handling crowded programming schedules, particularly when it comes to the Olympics, which it has televised for nearly 30 consecutive years.
Record Number of Hours Expected
The 2026 Winter Olympics, officially “Milano Cortina 2026,” will take place in the cities of Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Feb. 6-22, and feature about 2,900 athletes across 16 sports. NBC promises more than 3,000 hours of coverage across all of its platforms (including NBC, USA Network, CNBC, Peacock, NBCOlympics.com, and the NBC Sports app), with nearly 200 hours of coverage on NBC alone.
Darryl Jefferson, senior vice president of engineering and technology for NBC Olympics and Sports, will oversee broadcast operations to ensure the most comprehensive coverage of what the International Olympic Committee said is “the most geographically widespread Winter Olympics in history,” spanning an area of more than 22,000 square kilometers (over 8,500 square miles).
Although this is the first Winter Games with Jefferson at the helm—he succeeds Dave Mazza, who retired in 2023—Jefferson is a longtime veteran of NBC Olympics, joining in 2008 as director of postproduction.
And while the team had nearly two years between the Paris Games and the 2026 event, that was not the case for the last Winter Games in Beijing in 2022, when NBC Olympics had only about a six-month window between the pandemic-delayed 2020 Tokyo Summer Games, held in the fall of 2021, and Beijing.
Geographic Sprawl
The biggest challenge for Milan-Cortina 2026 is the aforementioned geographic sprawl, Jefferson said. For example, the distance from the Olympic hub in Milan to the competition venues is measured in multiple hours, with the skating venue approximately five and a half hours away and the men’s and women’s alpine skiing venues three hours apart.
With most of the country’s municipalities opting to use existing facilities instead of constructing new purpose-built operations for the 16-day event, locations are not always optimal.
“That’s one of the reasons why all of our venues are so geographically spread out,” he said. “They’re well-established and beautiful, but they are further apart than we’ve ever seen before, so we had to build a plan that looked at very geographically disparate venues.
“In so many Olympic cities of the past, you’d go into the Olympic hub and you’d have a number of venues that are clustered together,” he added. “Here, a lot of the venues are far apart, so we had to rethink deployment of people and gear. We’ve come up with a very good plan for doing all of those things, but we honestly had to throw out the old book.”
Nevertheless, it’s not like this is abnormal for a world-class event. “It is spread out, but that’s the Olympics for you,” Jefferson added.
All but one venue is being largely produced in Stamford for this Winter Games, which is a sea change.”
Darryl Jefferson, NBC Olympics and Sports
With such a dispersed physical layout, particularly in rural areas, moving personnel and gear to venues is paramount, Jefferson said. The NBC team learned a lot while producing live coverage of sporting events during a pandemic, he said, with much of the coverage originating from the NBC facilities in Stamford, Conn.
“We learned a lot of valuable lessons with the ‘COVID Olympics’ in Tokyo and Beijing in that we still had a good deal of production on site in Tokyo—we had the primetime show and the control rooms in the IBC [International Broadcast Center] in Tokyo and Beijing; all of those things ended up coming home,” Jefferson said. “So a lot of those ‘lessons learned’ were about, ‘What can we do to maintain the high level of production value doing it from Stamford?’ And then, when COVID lifted, we tried to strike the balance of the teams that were on-site for Paris and the might of having a big broadcast facility in Stamford and pushing it to its limits.”
Staying Connected
NBCUniversal hadn’t finalized its format plans for the two weeks of the Games by presstime, however with Sunday Feb. 8 being part of “Legendary February,” the network is presenting the Super Bowl as well as the Games live all day in 4K HDR on NBC and Peacock—17 hours of 4K HDR coverage in all. This marks the first time the Olympics and Super Bowl are being presented in 4K HDR on NBC and Peacock, according to the network.
Jefferson noted NBCUniversal’s commitment to capturing all the action in the highest available quality for any platform.
“Like in Games past, and particularly like in Paris, we will capture and produce everything everywhere in 1080p/HDR, and we’ll have deliverables for a number of platforms, both linear and Peacock [NBCU’s streaming service] in 4K HDR as well,” he said. “We’re fairly committed to HDR and 4K deliverables.”
These data-hungry formats require ever-more-increasing bandwidth between the Olympic host city and Stamford.
“In Paris, we had four 100-gig circuits and two 10-gig circuits for ancillary data and we will have the same for Milan-Cortina,” Jefferson said. “The difference between the Summer and Winter Games is that the Summer Games have so many more concurrent sports, but from a technology and connectivity perspective, we won’t take a step backwards. The connectivity we’ll use for Milan-Cortina will echo what we used in Paris, which is kind of almost unfathomable, because there’s so many fewer sports.”
And, as in years past, NBC Olympics will work as a mostly SMPTE-2110 IP-based operation, according to Jefferson. “We still have some bits and pieces that are SDI, but we’re getting our primary feed from Olympic Broadcasting Service at the International Broadcast Center in 2110,” he said. “The core technology in the Stamford facility is 2110—that’s our preferred method of exchange, but you still get outliers out there that are SDI in nature, and we appreciate them as well.”
Stamford is playing an ever-increasing role in coverage, Jefferson added.
“All but one venue is being largely produced in Stamford for this Winter Games, which is a sea change,” he said. “Figure skating production will be wholly produced on-site, with the production team facilities on-site. Every other venue is a split production.”
Using Data to Tell a Story
Since winter sports are not as popular in the United States as in other areas of the world, Jefferson said NBC Olympics will use more data to enlighten viewers on the intricacies of sports they usually see only once every four years.
“Using technology to describe through data use and visualization is really cool, because it gives people the awe-inspiring things that we see athletes do,” he said. “So we’re using data in a lot of ways to present things like rotational velocity or height, the types of things to get people to really understand, like, ‘Holy crap, that’s really remarkable!’
“One of our biggest partners is the OBS partner, Omega [the official Olympics timekeeper], but we have a bunch of other partnerships looking at computer vision analysis, relative speed, jump height, this type of thing, to explain better, and some of those things are internal to help our commentators explain,” he continued. “So we get to tell the story a bit better.”
The content-creator community will also play an important role in Olympics coverage, with increased mobile device use, Jefferson added. “In Paris, OBS used a fleet of mobile phones to cover the athlete experience on the boats coming into and up the Seine [during the opening ceremony],” he said. “I think it will be a similar offering this go, in addition to all the broadcast cameras. There’s a multiplier effect with all those mobile devices in and around the fields of play, behind the scenes and so on.”
Jefferson said he’s excited about NBC’s ability to give viewers a better understanding of the history of the host country, whether it’s in San Siro Stadium, where the opening ceremony will be staged, or at a remote sports venue.
“There are two very different Italys being presented—you have a very metropolitan city with the vision of the Duomo [cathedral] in the city center and all that goes with the fashion and the architecture and all that stuff in Milan,” he said. “And then, on the other hand, you have the unbelievably gorgeous Dolomites backing these small, quaint ski towns.
“And that dichotomy will be presented not just at the opening ceremony, but throughout the whole Games,” he added. “So it will be amazing to present those two Italys to the United States.”
