NBC Sports:
A Digital Operations Nerve Center
for the 2008 Olympic Games
©2008 ScheduALL
Abstract
For its third consecutive Olympic broadcast, NBC is using ScheduALL’s
innovative Enterprise Resource Management (ERM) solution to schedule
and manage feeds — representing more than 3,600 hours of coverage
— for the network’s coverage of the Olympic Games in Beijing.
Introduction
As the exclusive media rights holder to the Olympic Games through
2012, NBC has rightfully earned the title of “America’s Olympic Network.”
In August 2004, NBC offered a record 1,210 hours of Olympics coverage
from Athens, with more than 203 million viewers tuning in to watch live
prime time sporting events on NBC Universal networks including NBC,
MSNBC, CNBC, USA, Bravo, Telemundo, and HD affiliates.
During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the broadcasting logistics for NBC
have been far more complex than previous Games. With more than
3,600 hours of coverage planned, more than the total hours for every
summer Olympics ever televised in the United States, the Beijing
Olympics represent the most ambitious single media project in history.
Also, for the first time in the United States, NBC will provide live
streaming video coverage of events over broadband outlets including
Web sites and cell phones.
In order to help manage the logistical challenges of such a massive
media undertaking, NBC Olympics turned to ScheduALL, the leading
provider of broadcast ERM software. For the third consecutive NBC
Olympics broadcast, ScheduALL is being used to schedule and manage
the ingest and distribution of all video feeds across a wide array of
broadcast and broadband media outlets.
Situation Analysis
The complexity of NBC’s production environment is best expressed in
the numbers. Each of the 31 Olympic venues located in and around
Beijing has its own production facility responsible for numerous camera
positions, which will provide hundreds of feeds that will be processed and
delivered to air over the course of the games. The video components of
each feed — its location on the router, its satellite assignment, whether
it will be recorded or broadcast live — must be scheduled, tracked
and managed. NBC Olympics will be providing feeds for up to 48 HD
broadcasts and will be supplying up to 42 streaming encoders with
content for live and on-demand Webcasting.
Prior to its first ScheduALL implementation for the Athens Olympic
Games in 2004, NBC relied on a manual process for managing and
scheduling feeds. “Even in those days, sharing information and tracking
the different components of a broadcast had become very burdensome.
Now that we’re repurposing huge volumes of content for broadband
streaming, in addition to providing 24-hour broadcasts from any number
of our networks, we have far too many feeds to handle manually,” said
Errol Foremaster, Vice President of Engineering Operations for NBC
Olympics. “In such a high-pressure situation, we have no margin for
error — so we can’t afford not to choose the absolute best-of-the-best
technology solutions that work flawlessly and effectively. That’s why we
continue to partner with ScheduALL.”
The ScheduALL Solution
As the broadcast industry’s leading workflow and ERM solution,
ScheduALL is designed to support complex news and sporting event
operations, as well as production and transmission workflows. The
software’s intuitive user interface and adaptive framework saves
administrators time and effort by providing heightened project visibility.
ScheduALL connects workgroups, enhances communications, minimizes
duplication of effort and reduces human error.
At NBC, ScheduALL is a key component of a comprehensive digital
asset media solution, currently in implementation, that will manage all
video feeds and streaming encoders for transmitting Olympic content.
Sitting at the core of this media environment, ScheduALL captures and
manages critical information, such as start and stop times for each
event, video router assignments and satellite uplink scheduling, and then
passes this information automatically to downstream systems to facilitate
on-air coverage for each feed. In addition, ScheduALL generates reports
with scheduling and resource allocation data that can be easily accessed
worldwide by personnel in NBC’s Beijing operations center, as well as
in the company’s central broadcasting facility at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in
New York City.
Coordinating Resources Halfway Across
the Globe
In the months leading up to the Olympics, NBC has operated ScheduALL
on a test environment in New York. There, ScheduALL played a key role
in live coverage of U.S. Olympic trials events such as swimming and
track and field. Next, the ScheduALL database will be replicated to the
Beijing operations center to facilitate faster access from both locations
and to provide redundancy.
An important component of the system is NBC’s “highlights factory,”
a digital asset management system enabling engineers to mirror lowand high-resolution video between New York and Beijing. This more
effectively leverages the home facility in New York, where editing
facilities are dedicated to Olympics production work. “Our video editors in
New York can do shot selections on materials as they’re being recorded,
based on low-resolution versions. That way, the only high-resolution
versions we have to transfer to New York are the ones they’ve selected
for editing, which cuts down on our network overhead. It also keeps
us from having to build edit facilities in Beijing,” said Craig Lau, Vice
President of IT for NBC Olympics. “This would be difficult to accomplish
without ScheduALL, which lets us share information and book editing
resources across time zones and across our production community at
large. The result is a significant savings of time and cost.”
A Winning Formula
ScheduALL’s graphic view of all resources, facilities and schedules
has been a boon to NBC’s ability to manage production for the Beijing
Olympics. “ScheduALL provides a graphical means for us to track,
schedule and manage people, resources and equipment across multiple
time zones in a highly complex, constantly changing environment,” said
Lau. “The more you can give your team members a graphic view across
time zones, equipment, satellite bookings and other resources, the more
efficient they’ll be with fewer opportunities for errors.”
“Our goal is to build an integrated content platform that facilitates ingest,
storage, transport, production and playout of live video for all Olympics
events. In this situation, when you only have 17 days to process the
equivalent of eight days of footage every day, the task would be nearly
impossible in a tape-based environment,” Lau added. “ScheduALL is an
integral part of this content platform and is critical to our success.”
For more information contact ScheduALL:
US: +1.954.334.5406
sales@scheduall.com
UK: +44 (0) 20 7636 0707
eurosales@scheduall.com