[Medianext.MX]

Well, if you want to take a closer look at NBC's mammoth operations for a Summer Olympics, you are really well served with lots of information. NBC has had historically a very aggressively produced coverage, at a degree it often attracts heavy controversy.

Some of the controversies include the deliberate tape delaying of events to allow for primetime presentations, spoiling the results of events prior to their own tape delays, the editing of its broadcasts to make it closer to storytelling rather than straight play-by-play coverage, avoiding sensitive context content, and, specially, the ignorant commentary during the Ceremonies.

Fortunately, most (if not all) of these controversies have been addressed in recent years, resulting on more live coverage, and more appearances by guest contributors on political issues. Something that NBC has had mostly praise is the decision to not overfocus on Team USA athletes (although they do still have a quite numerous focus in many occasions), and are generally more inclusive of other countries' athletes (especially star foreigners). The book Olympic Television: Broadcasting the Biggest Show on Earth (Billings, A.C., Angelini, J.R., & MacArthur, P.J., 2018) offers more insight on how NBC's coverage is done.

In the case of production, these articles by SVG take a detailed look at the operations they have for their really OTT coverage. They traditionally have a large setup in the respective host cities, but they have increasingly shifted more and more operations back to NBC Sports' HQ in Stamford and other NBCU facilities.

---

Rio 2016

IBC:
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 

Stamford:
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 

---

Tokyo 2020

Tokyo:
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 

www.sportsvideo.org 

Stamford:
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 
www.sportsvideo.org 

CNBC Englewood Cliffs:
www.sportsvideo.org 

Telemundo Center (Miami):
www.sportsvideo.org 

---

They also pour heavy resources into their graphics packages and sets: something really interesting about the graphics they use is these are completely made in-house by a team led by Mark Levy and David Barton. These are really high-quality, and detailed research is done to reflect graphical trends related to each host city; during the Games, graphics are done in a real-time basis. Only the logos are outsourced work (for example, Rio 2016's logo was made by Trollbäck+Company, Tokyo 2020 by mOcean and Paris 2024 by Sibling Rivalry, as part of their work to redraw the Peacock).

Here's an interesting SVG conference where Barton himself explains how the Tokyo 2020 insert graphics were done, plus how these were fully rebadged for the Beijing 2022 Winter Games, given the short period of turnaround between both:

vimeo.com 

---

Another thing NBC Olympics has been upping the game lately has been in the sets. After years of reusing the same set design by Jeremy Conway (introduced in Sydney 2000), since 2014, the sets have been designed by a team led by Bryan Higgason, Paul Benson and Sid Wichienkuer. Their work for Sochi was made with Clickspring Design, eventually, the three parted ways with the studio and began working together as HD Studio; since 2016, their work for NBC Olympics has been done under this moniker. Since then, Higgason & his team have started working more with NBC teams, including designing sets for Telemundo's World Cup coverage and the sets for NBC News' new DC bureau.

www.newscaststudio.com 
www.newscaststudio.com 
www.newscaststudio.com 
www.newscaststudio.com 
www.newscaststudio.com 
www.newscaststudio.com