For NBCUniversal’s Paris ‘24 coverage, the best in broadcast tech
Cisco’s IP-based infrastructure enables the next wave of powerful, secure fan experiences, from American football to FIFA soccer.
Whether for live sports events, immersive concert experiences, or internal corporate TV, broadcast media demands the best.
But today, new technologies like 4k or 8k UHD video and augmented reality are creating challenges. And legacy infrastructure is not always cutting it.
That’s why Cisco’s flexible and scalable IP Fabric for Media (IPFM) is transforming, simplifying, and future-proofing broadcast operations around the world — from NBCUniversal’s coverage of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games to the FIFA Women’s World Cup, United Nations, and New England Patriots’ Gillette Stadium.
“One of the main challenges we've been trying to overcome in recent years is flexibility,” said Chris Lapp, a technical solutions architect for media and entertainment at Cisco. “A lot of the legacy technologies that broadcast customers use — for example, in the serial digital interface, or SDI world — require purpose-built pieces of hardware.”
Cisco’s latest-iteration IP-based solution streamlines broadcast operations in exciting new ways, while enabling distributed production, often from multiple locations that are continents apart.
“IPFM offers the ability to migrate to a more software-based infrastructure,” Lapp added, “with the flexibility to turn on or turn off capacity, as customers see fit — and, with distributed production, to send fewer people to an event.”
NBC Sports, which will present the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris to U.S. audiences, is a key adopter of the technology. With an all-IP production, it will offer its viewers the most comprehensive coverage of Olympic events, featuring 4k and 8k content and mobile cameras that bring viewers in the United States closer to the action than ever before. And with high-capacity, low-latency IPFM connections, it can carry out real-time production processes at its facilities back in the United States.
“NBC Sports is deploying a distributed production infrastructure four times larger than any previous Olympics in Paris,” said Cliff Ryan, NBCU’s vice president of network engineering. “Cisco’s high-performance service provider and media fabric infrastructure has been pivotal in seamlessly supporting this massive change in how and where NBC produces the Olympics.”
As Jonathan Davidson, executive vice president and general manager of Cisco Networking, emphasized, this is only the latest advance in a long-running partnership.
“NBC Sports and Cisco have consistently set the bar for scaling an all-IP production to deliver exciting and immersive experiences for the largest sporting event in the world,” Davidson said. “And this year with the help of Cisco’s advancements in simple and secure connectivity, NBC can offer more hours of the Games, on more screens with deeper personalization and interactivity.”
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