Profile
Since 2002, NBC has owned the American rights to broadcast the Olympics and deliver coverage from each event and medal ceremony across the United States via cable television and online. From February 9 to 25, 2018, NBC Sports Group, renowned for its unsurpassed award-winning production, presented the 2018 Winter Games from PyeongChang, South Korea, featuring live coverage of 102 events across 15 sports.
Challenges
While covering events in multiple venues, NBC Sports Group needed to deliver video files over a global 5 Gbps link to their headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, where the footage was edited. Archived footage also had to move from Stamford to PyeongChang, and across the various event locations for editorial purposes.
Sharing files effectively during the games was imperative, and this required a solution that could accelerate and facilitate concurrent file transfers. During peak hours, NBC Sports Group sent up to 100 large video files concurrently, amounting to 10 TB of transferred data daily. NBC Sports Group also needed a solution that could concurrently transfer MXF files as they were being encoded or growing.
Additionally, NBC Sports Group administrators needed a solution that could monitor their deployment and administer transfer nodes remotely and in real-time.
Solutions
To accelerate its global delivery process, and meet the other specified objectives, NBC Sports Group used FileCatalyst’s accelerated and managed file transfer platform. From the opening to closing ceremonies, FileCatalyst’s fast file transfer technology ensured that every transfer was fast, reliable, and secure.
The platform’s ability to accelerate transfer speeds, deal with concurrent transfers, and seamlessly transfer dynamic video files made for a streamlined workflow that saved significant time. New features were developed for their unique challenges, such as the ability to handle files that were growing and changing while being encoded. The solution handled and transferred up to 80 growing MXF proxy videos and 20 hi-res MXF video files currently – and delivered them in real-time.
FileCatalyst’s central management solution, FileCatalyst Central, provided NBC Sports Group with near real-time reporting, as well the ability to remotely administer transfer nodes from a browser.
Results
FileCatalyst successfully and seamlessly accelerated the transfer of digital content for the 2018 Winter Games. Additionally, FileCatalyst enabled NBC Sports Group to break new ground in live sports production by handling very high concurrency, overcoming the problem of transferring dynamically changing MXF files, as well as giving them the ability to remotely administer and monitor their FileCatalyst deployment in real-time.