Dana Oliver of NBCUniversal: “It’s not for the faint of heart.”
The clock ticked innocently until 9:34 a.m. ET on August 8. Just another moment on a Wednesday morning in the two-week marathon-that-is-a-sprint that is the Olympics. But that wasn’t it.
NBCUniversal’s Digital Network Operations Center (DNOC) – located at NBC Sports’ headquarters in Stamford – is the technical home of NBCUniversal’s streaming efforts for the Paris Olympics.
In the far corners of NBC Sports headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, the Digital Network Operations Center (DNOC) pumps a seemingly endless amount of live content to NBC’s streaming service Peacock. You could imagine a scoreboard there ringing like a slot machine on a heater paying out a jackpot on the Las Vegas Strip. At that moment, NBCUniversal’s streaming of the Paris Olympics — led by Peacock — reached 16.8 billion (with ab) streamed minutes for these Paris Games. There were a full five days of the Olympics left, and the media giant had just surpassed the number of streamed minutes of all other Summer and Winter Olympics it had streamed in its history … combined.
It’s well documented that these games in Paris were a welcome return to form for the Olympics as an entertainment product in the United States. Since most of the events here in the States take place during the day, they were perfectly suited to streaming viewers; and the team behind Peacock capitalized on that. Full live events. Multiviews. The hugely popular GoldZone wraparound studio show. It was a stellar achievement for Peacock and American viewers gobbled it up in heaping helpings.
“For us, it’s all about preparation,” says Dana Oliver, SVP of Global Streaming Operations for NBCUniversal. “In the lead-up to the Games, we spend a lot of time reviewing our workflows and adapting them based on what we’ve learned from previous live events. We’ve built out and scaled our production technology and are working closely with NBC Sports to ingest all content and prepare it for distribution. We also conduct several months of rehearsals and testing to plan for different scenarios that may impact how we deliver content to customers so we’re prepared for anything.”
“We have worked tirelessly to make the experience magical and flawless for our customers.” – Dana Oliver, SVP of Global Streaming Operations, NBCUniversal
The scale of the Olympics is, not surprisingly, staggering. Take just the first week, for example: Peacock managed up to 60 concurrent individual live event streams and up to 300 live events per day. That’s a total of over 1,800 individual live events during that period.
The backbone (nervous system? Whatever Gray’s Anatomy comparison you want to draw) of it all is Stamford-based NBCU DNOC. The technical core of the media company’s streaming operations, it’s responsible for supporting and optimizing the experience for users 24/7. That includes everything from monitoring and adjusting infrastructure to ensure customers are seeing the best possible streams for on-demand and live content, to driving distribution and support for live events to internal and external partners and platforms, to creating a seamless digital ad insertion process for advertisers.
Peacock was the No. 1 app in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store during the Olympic Games.
According to Oliver, the DNOC team consists of several dozen people, from front-line operators with varying expertise to control room engineers. During the Olympics, the team is expanded even further to manage all the content that comes to the platform. On an average Olympics day, the DNOC works with the programming and editorial teams at NBC Olympics and Olympic Broadcasting Services to receive live streams and encode those live events to Peacock and NBCUniversal’s TV Everywhere platforms. Once the content is on the platform, the DNOC is responsible for ensuring an optimal video experience for customers while also inserting ads, creating replays and monitoring the health of eligible devices.
Peacock’s consumer experience, in particular, was highly praised during these Games. NBC introduced several new features in the lead-up to Paris, including personalized daily recaps, Multiview (which NBC Sports officials say is used by nearly a quarter of Peacock’s audience), interactive schedules and chaptering within individual live events.
“I am extremely proud of what our team achieved before and during the Games,” says Oliver. “This is not for the faint-hearted. The team’s performance throughout the Games was first class and we worked tirelessly to make the experience magical and flawless for our customers. This is no easy task and the positive response from customers has been so gratifying.”
