NBC's Summer Olympics coverage has been a worldwide effort, from Tokyo to London to Connecticut

The Hollywood Reporter

The pandemic upended how NBC produces televises the Olympics. Instead of deploying a full crew in Tokyo, NBC Sports shifted its production across facilities around the world. “This is the first year where our footprint here has eclipsed our footprint in-country,” says NBC Sports vice president of engineering Tim Canary, who's been working out of NBC's facility in Stamford, Connecticut. The International Broadcast Center in Tokyo and NBC Sports’ Stamford headquarters were the main hubs, but NBC has also used NBC headquarters in New York City's Rockefeller Plaza, CNBC’s headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and Telemundo’s facility in Miami, as well as Comcast-owned Sky in London. In fact, all of NBC's indoor volleyball coverage originates in London. The lack of friends and family in Tokyo has also led NBC Sports to deploy a “Friends and Family” strategy of trying to bring the celebrations that are happening in homes and hometowns around the country to viewers at home, such as the viral video of Olympic swimmer Lydia Jacoby's friends and family's reaction in Alaska to her surprise gold win. “We’ve been working on this for months, even before the news was announced that international fans would not be allowed to travel to Tokyo,” said NBC Olympics primetime producer Rob Hyland. “It’s a pretty elaborate plan… It has its own production wing, and the umbrella continues to get bigger and bigger.” Meanwhile, NBC Sports set up a production facility in the ballroom of the downtown Marriott Hotel in Stamford to keep "shot pickers" -- the employees who find Olympic highlights -- socially distant from each other. “We have replay people at home, we have graphics people here for Sunday Night Football. That was not possible in the past,” says Canary. “A lot of things that we could do, that maybe shows were resistant to do, we had to do during COVID, because we couldn’t put people in trucks, we couldn’t put them in the field.”

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