Inside the IBC

The Closing Ceremonies are now underway, and Women's Bobsleigh gold medal winners, Kaillie Humphries and Heather Moyse have been named Canada's flag bearers. I hope you all enjoyed the Gold Medal Hockey game for Team Canada!  Canada finished with 25 medals (10 gold, 10 silver, and 5 bronze), in third place (ranked by gold/silver/bronze) behind Russian with 33 and Norway with 26.  The USA had 28 medals, but only 9 gold.

I wanted to give you a brief tour of the IBC where I am working for NBC.  NBC has about 3000 people working here in Sochi and many, many more working back in their Sports headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut and the News headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York.

Me on the set of NBC Studio 2!

 

The Host Broadcaster is OBS (Olympic Broadcasting Services) and they provide the video that is used by most international broadcasters, including NBC (although NBC also uses their own cameras at many high profile venues).  This is a panorama of the OBS distribution and transmission centre...

 

OBS Distribution Centre

 

In the NBC Broadcast Operation Centre (BOC, below), we have Inbound Transmission (left), in which transmissions from the venues are received, and Release (right) where our outgoing transmission to the US take place.  In the foreground is the BOC Supervisor area.  They manage all the traffic in the BOC.

 

Broadcast Operation Centre (BOC)

 

The studio show is produced from a Control Room (NBC has two, A and B).  The director, producer, and technical staff sit in the front row.  The director decides which cameras to take, while the producer controls the storyline.  Other AD's (assistant directors) control when commercial breaks occur, and the TD (technical director) controls the actual switching of cameras (and the effects being used: fade, dissolve, cut, etc...)

 

Control Room B

 

An A1 (audio mixer) sits in an adjacent room and mixes the audio from all the microphones and produces the sound that you hear on air from the studio.  At each venue, there may (or may not, depending on the size of the venue) be a director and/or an audio mixer in a broadcast truck.  The audio mixer at the venue mixes the natural sound with the local commentary to create the mix that you hear at home.

 

Audio B

 

The studio floor is populated with cameramen, stage managers, and A2's (audio assistants) who hook up the "talent" (on-air personalities, like Bob Costas) with an IFB (the little ear bud that lets them hear the director's instructions).

 

Camera position in Studio 2

 

The studio host sits at a desk (or on a couch for interviews) in the studio, and hosts the show you see on TV.  The set contains lots of local kitsch as well as giant screens that provide a changing backdrop for the set.

 

Studio 2 host position

 

In other parts of the NBC facility, we have Edit rooms (where highlights and production stories are cut and developed), Graphics (which creates the titles and overlays), Ingest (which records all video feeds for their library), New Media (which produces the online .COM content), and others.  In addition, there are production facility in New York and Stamford that also have the same functions and produce content for air from the US.

 

COMMs (my home!)

 

All of these people need to talk to each other, in real time, during the production, and playback of a show.  To do that, NBC uses a broadcast intercom made by my company, and for which I, and my colleague James Puttick, write all of the software.  Users throughout the facility talk to each other using keypanels like below (with key assignments and push-to-talk access to anybody in this facility, or even back in New York or Stamford).

 

A keypanel used for communications...

 

This is the COMM's crew, from left, Tony Kramer, John Herman, Jason Conway, Bob Gilmartin, John Pastore, Sean McKinnon, Rickey Hayes, and Patrick Martin.

 

The COMM's crew!

 

I have worked with Tony and Bob since Atlanta 1996, and with Rickey and John since Beijing.  John is the Director of Communications for NBC Sports, but couldn't be here for these games, and we miss him a lot.  We always do a COMMs photo and since John isn't here, we have the "virtual John" cut-out shown above (wish you were here buddy!).  Rickey Hayes is the Communications Manager for the Olympics and has done a great job filling John's shoes, in what has been a very challenging Olympics for COMMs (logistically, not operationally).

 

NBC Olympic Coverage, I have been here for 9 of them!

  

I am so fortunate to be here, and am entirely grateful to NBC, John, and Rickey for continuing to include me, and allowing me to take part in the Olympics, and to Bosch for allowing me to come!