PyeongChang 2018: NBC Olympics Relies on Grass Valley Infrastructure to Produce Winter Games Coverage

NBC Olympics, a division of NBC Sports Group, has selected Grass Valley, a Belden brand, to provide infrastructure solutions for its production of the XXIII Olympic Winter Games, which take place in PyeongChang, South Korea, from Feb. 8–25. The announcement was made by Terry Adams, vice president, IBC Engineering, NBC Olympics, and Kyle Luther, vice president of sales, Western U.S., Grass Valley.

Grass Valley has been supplying infrastructure solutions to NBC Olympics since 2006 and in 2018 is again providing a number of solutions that will enhance NBC Olympics’ production efficiency within NBC’s studios inside the International Broadcast Center in PyeongChang.

The SME-1901 Streaming Encoder is filling an important role, providing multiformat video/audio over IP and featuring 3G/HD/SD SDI inputs. This capability offers tremendous flexibility, enabling the NBC Olympics production team to view video feeds from any camera directly, as well as edit low and high-resolution content from their desktop or laptop computers.

The SME-1901 accepts any video format and provides two H.264 streams, one high resolution and one low resolution, and is housed in the Densité 3+ FR4 Frame alongside the XVP-3901, which handles all essential video, audio and metadata signal processing functions on a single module. The XVP-3901 offers up/down/cross conversion, color space conversion, frame synchronization, audio embedding and de-embedding and supports fiber optical I/O.

To help ensure the highest quality content and seamless production, NBC Olympics is using Grass Valley’s iControl Customized End-to-End Facility Monitoring and Control system. With iControl, the team is building an integrated monitoring and control surface for QC operators, consolidating multiple key functions into a single interface for greater efficiency, such as control of XVP-3901, monitoring of WFM feed and control of the QC router. iControl also improves the flow by allowing operators to select feeds that they wish to pay more attention to.

Grass Valley is providing a range of other solutions to NBC Olympics for coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics. These include:

• Densité Remote Control Panel for Densité cards
• Three NVISION 8500 HYBRID routers with a highly intuitive graphical interface and simplified video/audio signal processing and control
• NVISION Compact CQX router providing clean and quiet outputs for 3G/HD/SD signals and six auxiliary outputs for preview or monitoring to enable seamless video and audio transitions
• LUMO Series High Density Fiber Converter to greatly streamline the cabling for the production with a 1 RU frame and 36 SFP-based fiber converters
• 34 Kaleido-IP Multiviewers for monitoring both IP and SDI sources on one monitor

To assist with production needs at remote venues in South Korea, Grass Valley is providing three NVISION 8500 HYBRID routers and Kaleido multi-viewers, solutions that will be deployed by NBC Olympics anywhere a flypack is used.

“This will mark NBC Olympics’ eighth consecutive Games that we have worked with Grass Valley on our critical infrastructure at the NBC IBC and venue facilities,” says Adams.

“This long track record of rock solid reliability and flexibility is without reproach. There are hundreds of incoming and outgoing feeds, in multiple locations, all requiring routing, control and monitoring. The integrated solutions that Grass Valley provides allow us to proactively manage all of these complex workflows in the highly charged live environment of the Winter Olympics.”

“A broadcast production that is the size and scope of the Winter Olympics presents a number of challenges that must be considered when building the infrastructure to efficiently manage and move all the signals that are coming in from different sources and in different formats,” says Luther.

“Because all of our products are designed to address common industry standards, we are able to process any signals and move them through the workflow to deliver the high-quality content expected from NBC Olympics during its production of the Winter Games.”