Live From Paris 2024: NBC’s Paris Broadcast Operations Take ST 2110 to New Heights at the IBC and Beyond
Smaller footprint doesn’t mean less power as Paris presence serves as tech hub
NBC’s footprint for the Paris Olympics is 3,400 sq. meters, down from 5,500 sq. meters for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. But the broadcaster packs a lot of firepower into that smaller footprint, a place that Todd Donovan, VP, engineering and technology planning, NBC Sports and Olympics calls “NBC’s Forward Operating Base.”
NBC Olympics’ Broadcast Operations Control (BOC) in Paris is the hub for all the signals transmitted across the Atlantic for final production in Stamford.
“It’s where everybody gets provisioned and deals with things like Games event management, logistics, and food, but it is also our technical hub,” Donovan explains. “[At its heart is] our Broadcast Operations Control, and the BOC has a big function for these Games: it collects more than 80 world feeds from OBS.”
At the BOC, the engineering team can monitor not only the OBS feeds but many of the incoming feeds from NBC efforts at the various venues and studios. “All of that is going back across our network to our broadcast facility in Stamford,” says Donovan, “and everything is recorded there.”
Todd Donovan and the engineering team are overseeing operations in Paris at the IBC that are tightly tied into home operations in Stamford.
For the first time ever, those feeds — everything from event coverage to highlights, beauty camera shots, and more — are taken in by NBC Olympics via a SMPTE ST 2110 stream.
“Normally, we would take them in over 12-Gbps optical,” he says, “and it would be more SDI, ‘video-ish’ style. But now it’s 2110 streaming media, and it comes at us as a multicast. We’re catching that multicast at 4K UHD and converting it to 1080p50 HDR.”
At the core of that transport is a Cisco fabric with a Grass Valley routing-control layer. A Lawo VSM system is used for panel presentation at the IBC. (In Stamford, CT, that operation has moved over to EVS Cerebrum).
Making the move fully to ST 2110 paid dividends when it came to setup. “When you are the forward operating base,” says Donovan, “you need to throw things together relatively quickly, and an IP-based environment goes together faster [than an SDI environment]. It means fewer physical cables because fiber carries many more signals. It is also remarkably reliable and scales better. You can have the router very easily do 1080p, 1080i, 4K, HDR or SDR. If it is properly provisioned, it doesn’t care [what the signal is].”
The trick in going to ST 2110 is accepting that, although you will save time pulling cables and fabricating connectors, you also need to have the staff on board to handle IP configuration.
“The elegance of ST 2110,” Donovan explains, “is that there are consoles with only a couple of fibers going to it and they can feed a whole host of devices. If somebody wants to add something, like a monitor, we don’t need to have firefighters standing by to pull a battery of cables from the equipment room; it’s just one more port on an endpoint card.”
One of two racks that serve as the interconnect between OBS and NBC operations
NBC is taking the 1080i SDR feed as a backup to upconvert to 1080p50 in the event of a failure.
“Stamford will get what they’re expecting all the time, which is 1080p50 HDR,” he says. “We do that by handing off the signals to Media Links as part of our AT&T agreement. They handle international transmission to America via two 100-gig circuits that are protected, so it’s more like 400 Gbps. We have two other 10-Gbps circuits also protected to go across the ocean.”
Located next door to that massive video wall is a small shading area, which is new for this Olympics. About 18 cameras are shaded there: cameras used at the smaller venues, by unilateral crews, at the mixed zones, or in the insert studio at the IBC. NBC cameras at large, A-level venues — swimming, athletics, gymnastics — as well as at the four Trocadéro studios are shaded in the trucks at those venues.
“We have great video guys at the IBC with great eyes looking at great scopes in ideal conditions,” notes Donovan. “Being part of the BOC, they have situational awareness as to what’s going on.”
One area of the facility that shows the impact of IP and the move to next-generation technologies is the main equipment room, which is located next to the room where Aggreko provides technical power with NBC-owned uninterruptible power-conditioning units. In the equipment room, NBC’s RIB (Racks in a Box) units house the hardware behind the control surfaces throughout the IBC, including the fiber platform, the brains of the IP router, standards converters, media management, and file transfers. Two racks called “Meet Me Rack One and Two” are demarcation points between the OBS optical connections and the NBC infrastructure. Previously converted to electrical connections, the optical path is maintained into Grass Valley XIP cards.
“That was what we envisioned when we conceived this a long time ago,” Donovan explains. “It spits out into our ST 2110 environment with all the frame-syncing and channel=mapping capabilities it is supposed to have. We did a test with OBS in Madrid in October to make sure that it worked.”
Getting Up and Running
As with every Olympics, getting the IBC planned, set up, and running was a multi-year effort. OBS took over the building on Jan. 1 and begin putting up the wall systems, ceilings, and other infrastructure and design elements.
“We submitted our final plans about six months prior to that,” says Donovan. “This hall is brand new with modern, sustainably built infrastructure and much higher base-building ceilings than the other halls.”
NBC took delivery of the building in mid May and, by the end of the month, had created a beachhead. “The process was about putting the furniture in place and starting to move in our RIBs, which are our big racks loaded with the technology, as well as delivering the tools for the wiring crew. Then our early engineers started setting everything up.”
Soon the Wi-Fi was up, and the facility became ready to accommodate more than 1,500 NBC staffers who head to the IBC, get equipment, get questions answered, and more before beginning their assignment.
NBC’s operations at the IBC have become a well-oiled machine. In many ways, the physical setup is consistent from one Games to the next, providing muscle memory for staffers working more than one Games. The pandemic, and the Beijing Games in particular, did create some new workflows, such as the NBC primetime-control room relocated to Stamford.
NBC has three production galleries for Paris 2024: one in Stamford, one at the IBC in Paris, and one at the Trocadéro studio complex.
NBC has two production galleries in Paris — one at the IBC, the other at the Trocadéro studio — allowing producers and talent there to feel as if they are in the same room as the team in Stamford. The Stamford team, in fact, builds out the monitor-wall configuration for those galleries, ensuring that, when someone references a feed in a monitor in one gallery, it is in the same monitor-wall location for everyone. A small telepresence allows everyone to see all the galleries.
“The basic concept,” Donovan explains, “is that it’s a copy of a good part of the monitor wall in Stamford and that wall is reflected to the Trocadéro, here at the IBC, and to a conference room in our Stamford building. When [staffers are in] the control room, great, and, when they’re not in the control room, they kind of retire to this conference room to plan the next show. They can also keep an eye on all the different networks that NBC has televising the Olympics, as well as the outputs of the edit rooms at the different venues, the line cuts of the different trucks, all the Stamford control rooms doing their thing, and individual remotes. But everyone sees the exact same wall.”
One outgrowth of COVID protocols is that shop operations — where cameras, lenses, and other gear are readied and repaired before heading out to the field — are now part of NBC’s presence at the IBC, instead of at an external warehouse. “It made sense to keep the engineering team together in the building,” he says. “Because some other things moved to the city center — mainly our primetime studio, our daytime studio, and a whole lot of office support — we had the space.”
Although Stamford may have the majority of booths for talent to call competitions or do voiceover work, NBC has two off-tube booths and two regular announce booths at the IBC. Off-tube capabilities connect talent in Stamford and talent in Paris, allowing them to call the same event; spy cameras enable them to see each other and provide visual cues as if they were side by side.
“If we put an NBC or Peacock logo on it, we put an NBC voice on it,” says Donovan. “It’s how we tell our story. If it just goes out over the internet, it might be an OBS voice. That’s why we need 40 announce booths between here and Stamford, as we have added more and more hours over the years.”
As with every Olympics, there is a studio within the IBC: in this case, an insert studio that can be used in the event of rain or for shows like Watch With Alex Cooper, a series of live interactive watch parties, and Spotlight on Paris, a live TikTok show hosted by Savannah Sellers.
“The cameras from that studio exist full-time on the router in Stamford,” notes Donovan, “but we also have an insert-control room, where someone can see the cameras, get returns, and feed the monitors. It gives us a point of control for the studio.”
There is also a file-transfer area, where personnel help ingest content from on-location feeds and via remote file transfer from the venues, the studio at Trocadéro, and elsewhere around Paris.
The NBC Olympics IBC operation is proof positive that you can do more with less, especially when ST 2110 is involved.
“We pulled the SDI equipment out,” Donovan explains, “and, with primetime control going back to Stamford, we were able to squeeze the equipment need down and bring less stuff into the country, as well as having less complexity. You can see daylight through the top of the rib and the rack.”