Author: Sports Video Group Audio Editor Dan Daley
“The largest intercom system assembled for a single sports production in history.” That’s how John Pastore, senior director, broadcast communications, NBC Sports, describes the sprawling infrastructure connecting hundreds of technicians across the expansive Paris 2024 campus and the broadcaster’s technical mothership in Stamford, CT.
NBC Sports’ John Pastore: “A seamless web of communication options [allows] the NBC production folks to create just about any workflow they could dream up.”
“Comms is one of the most complex things broadcast engineers have to deal with. “Then,” he says, “there’s comms for the Olympics, which completely redefines complexity. We’re breaking records all over the place!”
Pastore, who managed broadcast communications for nine previous Olympics productions, notes how NBC Sports’ broadcast center in Stamford has evolved since replacing the IBC as the hub for the NBCUniversal’s Olympics coverage. For instance, intercom trunking was introduced, and analog and copper gave way to digital and fiber. Miles of analog audio and RS-485 data via Cat 5e cable were replaced with Dante and OMNEO AoIP networking via the same Cat5e. Dozens of TIFs using analog telephone lines were upgraded to RTS VLink SIP and Telos VX SIP interfaces.
“We brought Clear-Com’s LQ VoIP into the mix to launch simple two-wire comms remotely via raw internet at smaller locations,” he explains. “Topping things off, we introduced an RTS VLink 128-port virtual intercom. This allowed us to use cellular connected iPhones paired with Jabra headsets to behave like portable intercom panels while roaming the streets of Paris.
“The location change alone from Games to Games,” he continues, “forces us to be super-flexible and open-minded to new designs and ideas while capable of thinking outside the box. All of this together pushed our technical know-how and hardware outside [our] comfort zones at times, but it allowed us to find new and creative workflows that often surprised the manufacturer, inspiring future features and product ideas.”
Innovative Trunk Design
The massive use of intercom trunking for the large Paris Olympics campus was innovative and inflective.
“RTS’s trunking has been around for a while now,” Pastore points out. “We’ve used it more and more over the past few Olympic Games, but, for Paris, we went all-in: 24 trunked intercoms, 1,028 trunks between them, over 350 trunks in use on average at any given moment — not only historical for my team and NBC but possibly a record in the world’s community of comms. However, the size alone doesn’t win us the gold. That combined with a great design, organized deployment, and careful management sets us apart.”
Venues in Paris are trunked to each other and to NBC Sports’ broadcast center in Stamford.
Another innovation for the Paris Games was the use of cascaded trunking: traversing one intercom via a second intercom connection to communicate with a third intercom in series. A very complex plan was needed to ensure that no NBC intercom user ever ran out of trunks while communicating with any number of the 15,000-plus trunked resources in the system.
“With most venues trunked to the new Olympics mothership in Stamford and each other,” Pastore says, “we engineered a seamless web of communication options, allowing the NBC production folks to create just about any workflow they could dream up.”
He credits his team of a dozen operators and engineers: his “Comms A-Team” he calls them. “The Olympics [are] my excuse to bring the most talented broadcast-communications engineers on the planet together every two years to make this happen. With the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics already in our sights, I’m excited to see where the world of broadcast comms will go next.”
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