Cinnafilm Tachyon Case Study: NBC Olympics tackles Sochi’s multi-platform challenge with Telestream and Cinnafilm
Published: August 20th 2014
Cinnafilm Tachyon Case Study: Background
NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group, produces programming and promotions for NBCUniversal’s coverage of the Summer and Winter Olympic Games across all of its properties including the NBC broadcast network, multiple cable networks and various digital and new-media platforms. To support its coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympics from Sochi, Russia, NBC Olympics employed over 2000 people at its International Broadcast Center (IBC) in the Olympic Village in Sochi and over 400 people at a companion IBC located within NBC Sports’ Stamford, Ct. headquarters, with the two facilities networked via fiber-optic links.
The Challenge: How Cinnafilm Tachyon Helped the 2014 Sochi Olympic Games
For Sochi, NBC Olympics was tasked with delivering an unprecedented amount of coverage for a Winter Games totaling over 1,539 hours, more than the 2010 and 2006 Winter Games combined. That included a record 539 hours on NBC Universal’s television channels, with 185 hours on broadcast network NBC, 124 hours on the fully-distributed cable channels CNBC, MSNBC and USA Network, and 230 hours on its dedicated sports channel, NBC Sports Network. The traditional TV coverage was supplemented by over 1,000 hours of coverage on digital platforms. These included live streaming coverage of all 98 events on NBCOlympics.com, along with on-demand event replays and highlight packages. Plus, live streaming and on-demand clips for mobile devices were delivered through the NBC Sports Live Extra App and on-demand highlight packages and event replays were offered through cable operators’ video-on-demand platforms.
“Almost every file path for non-traditional TV was covered by Vantage in some way, either by workflow orchestration, just checking a file, or actual transcoding,” says Jefferson.
This Cinnafilm Tachyon Case Study has been expanded in a whitepaper, which can be ready by clicking here.
From the white paper:
“In Sochi, NBC Olympics utilized eight identical systems provided by Telestream, each consisting of Vantage Transcode IPTV VOD, Vantage Analysis and Tachyon standards conversion software from third-party vendor Cinnafilm, all running on GPU-accelerated Telestream Lightspeed Servers. Five Vantage systems were based at the NBC Sports facility in Stamford, Ct. and three were located at the IBC in Sochi, Russia. The Vantage systems were combined by Vantage Array into a network at each site that enabled greater video processing efficiency and redundancy.”