MONTREAL -- NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group, has selected Grass Valley, a Belden Brand, to provide infrastructure solutions for its production of the XXIII Olympic Winter Games, which take place in PyeongChang, South Korea, from February 9 – February 25. The announcement was made today by Terry Adams, vice president, IBC Engineering, NBC Olympics, and Kyle Luther, vice president of sales, Western U.S., Grass Valley.

Grass Valley has been supplying infrastructure solutions to NBC Olympics since 2006, and in 2018 is again providing a number of solutions that will enhance NBC Olympics’ production efficiency within NBC’s studios inside the International Broadcast Center in PyeongChang. The SME-1901 Streaming Encoder is filling an important role, providing multiformat video/audio over IP and featuring 3G/HD/SD SDI inputs. This capability offers tremendous flexibility, enabling the NBC Olympics production team to view video feeds from any camera directly, as well as edit low- and high-resolution content from their desktop or laptop computers.

The SME-1901 accepts any video format and provides two H.264 streams, one high resolution and one low resolution, and is housed in the Densité 3+ FR4 Frame alongside the XVP-3901, which handles all essential video, audio and metadata signal processing functions on a single module. The XVP-3901 offers up/down/cross conversion, color space conversion, frame synchronization, audio embedding and de-embedding and supports fiber optical I/O.

To help ensure the highest quality content and seamless movement of signals throughout the production, NBC Olympics is using Grass Valley’s iControl Customized End-to-End Facility Monitoring and Control system. With iControl, the team is building an integrated monitoring and control surface for QC operators, consolidating multiple key functions into a single interface for greater efficiency, such as control of XVP-3901, monitoring of WFM feed and control of the QC router. iControl also improves the flow by allowing operators to select feeds that they wish to pay more attention to.

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