From New Jersey, It's Curling
By Glen Dickson -- Broadcasting & Cable, 2/6/2006
NBC will be even more fascinated by its curling coverage than viewers will— if that's possible. In one of two cost-saving experiments, “Curling-At-Home,” both the curling-venue control room and the daypart control room will be run out of CNBC headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. The announcers and camera operators will be in Torino, but the producer, director and production staff will be in the Garden State.
To do it, CNBS will use a DS-3 (45-megabit-per-second) fiber-optic link and lots of IP-based communications gear from Telex, encoders from Tandberg, and video-processing and control gear from Miranda.
“We will be moving four camera feeds to them, and they will push two video feeds back to us [for announcers to voice over],” explains Dave Mazza, senior VP, engineering, NBC Olympics. “We have two Tieline commentary codecs, and we also have Miranda's iControl system for remote control, so the technical director in New Jersey changes the route on what goes home on the feeds.”
From Englewood Cliffs, the program goes to the MSNBC facility in Secaucus, N.J., for commercial insertion and distribution.
In the second initiative, NBC will try out “Edit-At-Home,” for editing broad- cast and cable promos, video for Web site nbcolympics. com, and highlights for VOD distribution via a link with Torino.
