NBC Olympics Selects Harmonic to Provide Media Storage and Playout Server for Its Production of 2016 Olympic Games in Rio

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwired - April 14, 2016) - NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group, has selected Harmonic MediaGrid shared storage system and Spectrum™ MediaDeck integrated media servers for its production of the Games of the XXXI Olympiad, which will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from Aug. 5 - Aug. 21. The announcement was made today by David Mazza, CTO & SVP of NBC Olympics and Bart Spriester, SVP, Video Products at Harmonic.

NBC Olympics will use the multiple Harmonic solutions in its most critical production areas: in 10 global locations covering the event for broadcast, on demand, digital, news operations, and long term archive. This wide-area production model facilitates cost-effective content creation by helping NBC Olympics maintain a portion of its operation in the United States.

"Harmonic infrastructure has been at the heart of the NBC Olympics production workflow since the 2008 Beijing Olympics, supporting the evolution of coverage into a spectacular multiplatform offering of exciting, timely content," said Spriester. "We're proud to be a trusted partner of NBC Olympics once again, and we look forward to a hugely successful 2016 Rio Olympics."

"We are counting on Harmonic's integrated systems as part of our high and low resolution workflows. From ingest through media storage across 10 locations, MediaGrid and Spectrum systems are the backbone of our content acquisition and production workflows," said Darryl Jefferson, VP, Post Production Operations, NBC Sports Group.

During the Rio Games, Harmonic infrastructure and production solutions, which are already well-established at NBC Olympics' Stamford, Conn., facility, will operate with systems installed at the NBC Olympics production compound within the International Broadcast Center in Rio to enable NBC Olympics to offer high volumes of timely content on multiple television channels. Incorporating MediaGrid ContentStore 5840 high-density storage nodes, the Harmonic MediaGrid system will provide centralized shared storage that packs tremendous bandwidth and capacity into a nearly 70 percent smaller footprint than alternatives, delivering significant cost savings on equivalent storage capacity. The MediaDeck server systems will facilitate on-the-fly capture and proxy generation for all incoming materials.