Watching a hard-fought badminton match between China and Japan, NBCUniversal‘s Andrew Siciliano had an urgent off-mic question for his research staff.
“Is the winner of a game the first one to 15 or first to 21?” he asked. Papers were shuffled, device screens swiped. As one of two hosts of Gold Zone, the popular curated show on Peaco*ck spotlighting dramatic matchups and moments at the Summer Olympics, Siciliano’s task, like that of his 2,000 colleagues at NBCU’s production hub in Stamford, CT, is to quickly get up to speed on an event happening some 3,600 miles away and then present it to viewers in an authoritative, engaging way. (Badminton games – they’re not “sets” like in tennis or squash – go to 21 points, the researchers affirmed.)
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Asked in an interview about his approach to Gold Zone, which is a close cousin of his former studio gig, hosting NFL Sunday Ticket Red Zone on DirecTV, Siciliano described it as “all-encompassing – it has to be. I think I speak for everyone in the building when I say that it takes over your entire life.”
Arecent visit to NBCU’s Stamford production hub offered a look at the staff’s full immersion, and also left no doubt where NBCU’s new center of gravity is for live sports. Wherever events may be taking place, all roads lead here, to an airplane hangar-sized outpost off I-95, about 40 miles north of 30 Rock.
With Stamford as its heartbeat, the Paris Games have turned out to be an impressive feat of technology, internal communication and a potent symbol of the strategic plan of NBCU and its corporate parent Comcast, which has Olympic rights through 2032. The abundance of coverage – some 7,000 hours of it – and factors like the rebound from Covid and a number of strong American performances have paid big dividends in viewership, which has more than doubled that of Tokyo in 2021. About 41.5 million people tuned in on the first Sunday, July 27, and the audience has remained healthy, hitting 34.6 million on August 3.
In contrast with the London Games in 2012, which had roughly 3,000 NBC staffers on the ground, this time only about 1,200 to 1,400 are in France, with the solid majority in Connecticut. That ratio could grow even more at the 2026 Winter Games in Milan-Cortina, Italy. To some traditionalists, handling the Paris Games in this fashion is as authentic as a baguette from Au Bon Pain, but it is actually very much in keeping with the always-on-Zoom times and is also enabling far more capacity. The “too-much-ness”-as-an-asset view was advanced by The Guardian in a piece declaring Paris an “overwhelming triumph.”
The “Billion-Dollar Lab”
Amy Rosenfeld, SVP of NBC Olympics Production, came to the company in 2022 after a long stint at ESPN. She had also earlier in her career worked at a string of Olympics on her way up the production ladder. Coming off two muted Olympics in Tokyo 2021 and Beijing 2022 (the former due to Covid and the latter in part because of China’s repressive government and unfriendly-to-Western-viewers time zone), she said a revised strategic direction took shape.
“‘Let’s analyze how we can maintain the significant infrastructure here and not have it be affecting the viewer in a negative way,’” leaders said, in Rosenfeld’s words. “And, moreover, how can we take some of the savings by not having a small flotilla of people Paris and put that on the screen?”
The shift toward Stamford “isn’t about saving money,” Rosenfeld insists. “In many ways, it’s about redeploying resources.” As a member of the production team in Sydney and Athens, “I was sitting in a broom closet. My pupils were the size of frisbees for three weeks,” she recalled. “I never saw the light of day.”
Having invested $7.65 billion in the rights to the Olympics through 2032 and also given increasing scrutiny of expenses across the media business, NBCU has put a lot of stock in Stamford’s potential, though no one has put any numbers to the savings.
One lesson NBCU learned after Tokyo was that the company needed to overhaul its use of Peaco*ck after missteps widely acknowledged by Mark Lazarus, chairman of the NBCUniversal Media Group and other execs. In 2021, the streaming service was little more than a confusing and frustrating billboard for the games, enticing viewers to watch but offering little on the platform. This time, Peaco*ck is the anchor, streaming all 329 medal events.
Lazarus also recently referred to the Olympics as NBCU’s “billion-dollar lab” for all of the testing and learning it allows. When plans for Peaco*ck were first revealed in 2020, Tokyo was intended to be “rocket fuel” for its launch, as then-NBCU CEO Steve Burke put it. That synergy, dashed by Covid, is reasserting itself.
Subway Maps And Crash Rooms
One of the main scientists in the NBCU lab is DarrylJefferson, SVP Engineering and Technology, NBC Sports and Olympics. He showed Deadline two “subway maps,” multi-color flow charts indicating the path of video signals in 2012 and this year. He also showed off mixing rooms for Dolby Atmos sound and HDR signals showing the crispest possible resolution (until 8K comes along). The subway map has added dramatically more stops. On one recent day, Peaco*ck showed about 280 individual streams, 65 of them unique and concurrent ones. When Peaco*ck launched in 2020, the widespread belief in the industry and in tech circles was that livestreaming sports was a decidedly risky venture.
Jefferson drew a direct link to the positive reception to the Games and the step-up in technology. “People are really responding,” he said. “They seem hungry for as much as they can get and we now have the resources to provide it to them.”
Sitting in the Stamford lobby on a steamy recent weekday, Rosenfeld was asked to describe the same scene at 5 a.m. on a typical day during the Games. “It’s buzzing,” she said. “There’s not a single parking spot available at that point.”
A small office near the entrance to the facility has been set up to coordinate “crash rooms” – last-minute hotel accommodations for staffers who have to stay in Stamford late or get there before dawn. About 30,000 hotel bookings have been handled during the Games.
In addition to the Gold Zone studio, there is a soundstage set up with dozens of small booths, big enough (barely) for two announcers and video monitors. Apart from gymnastics, swimming, basketball and a few other events, where announcers are live in France, most of the commentators are in Connecticut.
Announcers and other production staffers were trained with the help of five in-depth instructional videos, which drove home the importance of never referencing gambling (still a no-no for the Olympics) or making any other disruptive references. “We’re not asking anybody to lie. … We’re not trying to fool anybody. I think there’s now, post-Covid, a little bit of an acceptance that with this kind of volume, not everybody is going to be onsite.”
In the small-world circles of live sports production, Rosenfeld said she still gets asked why she’s not strolling down the Avenue des Champs d’Élysées right now.
“People say, ‘Are you upset you’re not in Paris?’” she said. “No, because this is the hub here. This is where the action’s happening.”
