NBC Olympics Selects Grass Valley Infrastructure Products for 2016 Olympics
NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group, has selected Grass Valley, a Belden Brand, to provide extensive infrastructure solutions for its production 2016 Rio Olympics. Grass Valley, which has supplied infrastructure solutions to NBC Olympics since 2006, is providing new products that will enhance production efficiency.
Heading the product lineup, the SME-1901 streaming encoder provides multiformat video/audio over IP and features 3G/HD/SD-SDI inputs. It will offer enable the production team and journalists to view video feeds from any camera directly and edit low- and high-resolution content from a desktop or laptop. The SME-1901 can accept any video format and provides two H.264 streams, one hi-res and one lo-res, and is housed in the new Densité 3+ FR4 frame alongside the XVP-3901, which handles all essential video, audio, and metadata signal processing on a single module. The XVP-3901 offers up/down/crossconversion, color-space conversion, frame synchronization, and audio embedding and de-embedding and supports fiber-optical I/O.
Another significant component in the infrastructure is Grass Valley’s iControl customized end-to-end facility-monitoring and -control system, which will be used to build 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 will also allow operators to select feeds that they wish to pay more attention to and put them in a Doghouse (or Penalty Box).
Other solutions to be provided to NBC Olympics are the 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, the 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 1RU frame and 36 SFP-based fiber converters, and 34 Kaleido-IP multiviewers for monitoring both IP and SDI sources on one monitor.
In addition, Grass Valley will provide NBC Olympics with infrastructure for coverage at remote venues. Three HYBRID routers and Kaleido multiviewers will be deployed anywhere a flypack is needed.
“We’ve had the honor of working with NBC Olympics for more than 10 years and are very excited about the advanced technologies we are bringing to the table this year,” said Kyle Luther, vice president of sales, North America, Grass Valley. “This is an incredibly complex production, requiring a robust infrastructure that will ensure everything runs smoothly and viewers experience the most compelling content.”
Says Terry Adams, VP, IBC engineering, NBC Olympics, “NBC Olympics has been working with the Miranda, now Grass Valley, brand since the 2004 Athens Games, and they have always provided the highest-quality products and expertise required for our coverage. There are hundreds of incoming and outgoing feeds, in multiple locations, all requiring routing, control, and monitoring. Grass Valley’s integrated iControl system allows us to deliver and maintain the technical quality demanded by our teams, and helps us tell the compelling stories that surround each event.”