NBC Olympics selects Lawo for VSM Control and IP Commentary from Rio
NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group, has selected Lawo to provide VSM (Virtual Studio Manager) Broadcast Control and Monitoring solution for its production of the Games of the XXXI Olympiad, which take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from August 5-August 21. The production will also utilise Lawo’s IP Commentary System. The announcement was made today by Timothy Canary, Vice President of Engineering, NBC Sports Group.
With the selection of Lawo’s VSM (Virtual Studio Manager) and its LCU, Lawo’s IP Commentary System, NBC Olympics will implement new, enhanced control flexibility at both the NBC Olympics production compound within the International Broadcast Center in Rio, and for the NBC Olympics’ studios in Stamford, Conn. VSM will be the overall control system for NBC Olympics’ core routing and tally management, connecting to multiple third party devices on an IP backbone, utilising approximately 80 LBP hardware panels and 80 GUI-based VSM Panels accessed from various monitors and tablets provided throughout NBC Olympics’ various production facilities.
NBC Olympics will also deploy a Lawo audio-over-IP Commentary System along with several Lawo V_pro8 video processors to manage their coverage from Stamford. The V__pro8s will receive video feeds from Rio, de-embed the audio and then insert into RAVENNA and MADI streams that will ultimately feed the Lawo LCU commentary system for up to 20 announce positions covering various sports. In addition, several venues in Rio will be connected to the NBC Olympics compound within the International Broadcast Center with Lawo’s V__remote4 units to provide connectivity and processing for network audio and video signals delivered via IP-connections from the remote sites.
“In going through the collaborative design process with NBC Olympics, it was critical that we had the ability to customise the overall system to support the workflows they wanted, while also providing the flexibility to grow the system as technologies evolve in the future. We’re pleased to have the opportunity to work with NBC Olympics from the design stage all the way through to implementation, and utilise a range of Lawo products and software to create an innovative remote production solution that addresses NBC Olympics’ objectives for these games and can also carry on into the future and continue to evolve and support new workflows,” stated Mark Whitman, Lawo Inc. Vice President of Sales.