Harmonic to provide NBC Olympics with MediaGrid Shared Storage and Spectrum Playout Systems during its multiplatform coverage of the PyeongChang Olympics.
NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group, has selected Harmonic to provide MediaGrid shared storage systems and Spectrum MediaDeck integrated media servers for its production of the XXIII Olympic Winter Games, that takes place in PyeongChang, South Korea, from February 9 – February 25. The announcement was made by Jim Miles, Director, Digital Workflow Systems NBC Olympics and Tim Warren, Senior Vice President, Video Business at Harmonic.
NBC Olympics will use Harmonic solutions for a variety of production applications, including broadcast, on-demand, digital, news operations and long-term archive. Harmonic Spectrum MediaDeck media servers deployed by NBC Olympics in PyeongChang will enable on-the-fly capture and proxy generation for all incoming materials. Harmonic MediaGrid shared storage systems located inside NBC’s studios at the International Broadcast Center in PyeongChang, as well as at NBC Olympics’ headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, will provide centralised shared storage with bandwidth and capacity.
“For over a decade, Harmonic’s media servers and shared storage systems have been a cornerstone of our content acquisition and production workflow during the Olympics,” said Miles. “During NBC Olympics’ coverage of the PyeongChang Games, Harmonic equipment will enable us to deliver more content from the host city to multiple linear television channels than any previous Winter Games.”
For the production workflow at NBC Olympics, Harmonic MediaDeck media servers will simultaneously record as many as 60 incoming venue feeds, giving NBC personnel at the Stamford facility independent control over 60 additional channels of ingest for locally produced Olympic content. Each recording’s proxy will be replicated in real time on a Harmonic MediaGrid storage system connected via two 10-Gigabit circuits to a second MediaGrid installed at the Stamford facility. In reportedly less than a minute, high-res content created on the PyeongChang MediaGrid system can be replicated on the Stamford MediaGrid system for immediate use in streaming, VOD and traditional broadcast editing.
