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It’s a blisteringly hot afternoon in Paris and Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie are midway through an edition of NBC’s Today show against the spectacular backdrop of the Eiffel Tower.
Olympic swimming legend Michael Phelps has just left after a live interview on their couch.
In a pre-recorded segment, the show’s Barefoot Contessa food correspondent, Ina Garten, is taking Kotb and Guthrie on a tour of her favorite Paris markets, to be followed by an item on French fashion in an adjacent studio set up for lifestyle coverage.
For the duration of the 2024 Olympics, Today is unfolding in NBCUniversal’s main Olympics studio in the Museum of Mankind (Musée de l’Homme) in Paris.
The institution, housing a 1,800 artefact collection exploring the trajectory of humanity over the course of seven million years, is situated in a grandiose building in the Palais de Chaillot with breathtaking views on the key Olympic venues of the Trocadero and the Eiffel Tower.
The museum’s four-star Café de l’Homme restaurant has been converted into a suite of studios, shared by Today, and NBC Sports’ nightly three-hour, Olympics-focused Primetime in Paris show, hosted by Mike Tirico with support from rapper Snoop Dogg.
In between, the NBC daytime schedule has been taken over by Olympics sports coverage. At the same time, NBCU’s Peacock platform is live streaming all the sports and events, with functions like Peacock Live Actions and Peacock Discovery Multiview allowing viewers to watch individual events for as little or as long as they want.
The media conglom’s linear networks USA Network, E!, CNBC, Golf Channel, Telemundo and Universo are also providing wall-to-wall coverage.
The Paris Olympics mark NBCU’s biggest ever Olympics operation in the history of NBC covering the games, which goes back on-and-off to 1964, and has been continuous since 1988 for the summer games and 2002 for the winter games.
In a deal stuck in 2014, the conglom paid an eye-watering $7.65B for exclusive U.S. media rights for the games from 2021 to 2032, against $4.4B for the previous period running from 2015 to 2020.
Paris marks the first big tournament under the new term after the Covid-19 restricted 2022 winter Olympics in Beijing meant NBCU did not get much bang for its bucks.
Split Operation
Two years later in Paris, the NBCU is going all out. It has roughly 1,800 people working out of NBC Sports’ International Broadcast Center in Stamford Connecticut, and 1,200 employees providing coverage on site in the French capital.
Within these numbers, more than 150 commentators are covering the sports from venues in Paris as well as remotely.
Gary Zenkel, President, NBC Olympics and Business, NBC Sport, says the 2024 games mark a first for the way the coverage is being split between teams in Paris and in Connecticut.
Most the directors and producers are based in the latter, including executive producer and president of NBC Olympics production Molly Solomon and Primetime in Paris producer Rob Hyland. The Today show producers are in New York.
Solomon and Hyland spent time in Paris prior to the start of the games and were in the city for the opening ceremony, with the latter producing coverage of the unwieldy event in situ but are now back in Stamford.
“The producers and directors who are looking at feeds and deciding what to plug into our program are sitting in Connecticut, with the exception of swimming, gymnastics and track and field,” says Zenkel . “We have a truck and full complement of our own cameras at those venues.”
The split configuration grew out of covering the winter games in Beijing in 2022 under difficult Covid-19 restrictions.
“Before Beijing, it would have been hard to imagine this kind of set up. For those games, we were required to send as few as people as possible, because of the risk of quarantine and it actually worked,” says Zenkel.
“The connection that producers had historically believed they needed, they recognized could be accomplished with the commentators here and other members of the team there (Connecticut).”
A clutch of top production staff are in Paris including Michael Sheehan, coordinating director for NBC Olympics; Joe Gesue, Senior Vice President, NBC Olympics & Paralympics Editorial, Partnerships and Programming & Executive Editor and Ron Vaccaro, VP, Editorial.
“Mike is head of production. He built the studios and determined all the camera positions at venues. He’s blocking cameras so that the shots from the venues are right, lit properly. A guy like that can never be disconnected,” says Zenkel.
Working alongside Sheehan and Gesue in a master gallery, in a space which is usually a private dining area, Vaccaro is in constant, direct contact with Hyland and Solomon back in Connecticut.
“He and Rob are involved in the minute-by-minute discussions of what to show… He has the same video monitor wall,” says Zenkel. “It’s like they are in the same room.”
Embracing Paris & The Time Difference
NBCU’s overall coverage is leaning into to the Olympics location of Paris, and embracing the relative freedom of the city after the locked down Tokyo and Beijing editions.
“It’s part of the bread and butter of how we approach the Olympics,” says Zenkel.
“We have 90 film crews doing stuff, we have athletes in and out of our studios, which was very difficult to do because of Covid, about an hour ago there were 30 people in, families of athletes who came on the Today show. This isn’t unique to Paris but we haven’t had it since Rio (in 2016).”
Gesue, who is on his 13th tour of duty on Olympic primetime shows for NBC Sports, says the 2024 Olympics are unique for the way the Paris has embedded the venues within the fabric of the city.
“That was foremost in our mind. We came here several times and when we were walking around the city, all of our walks would end up at the Trocadero. We’d would walk up the steps, come to the plaza and then turnaround and say ‘We have to be right here. There was no other option.’,” he recounts.
Other key considerations for Gesue were embracing the fans who were not present in Tokyo and Beijing and how to deal with the time difference, with Paris six hours ahead of Eastern Time and nine hours ahead of Pacific time.
“We know our primetime show is going to air at 2 a.m. Paris time, so nothing will be happening, so how do we handle that? What do we do? How do we adjust our thinking from years past? The conclusion we drew is that one of the big themes is how do we revitalize the Olympics and bring it back to the people.”
“As soon as the Today show ends 9 a.m. (ET), we go straight over to the Olympics. We’re on for nine hours with as much live coverage as we can. At the weekend, when the Today show doesn’t run, its 11, 12, 13 hours depending on the schedule. Then at night, we take the best of what has happened during the day and fuse it with extra elements and bits of entertainment, with Snoop, or Colin Jost in Tahiti, and a lot of the celebrities that come here to Paris. We try to infuse the primetime show with that atmosphere.”
Zenkel suggests the Paris schedule running 8 a.m. to 11pm locally, or 2 a.m to 5pm ET, offers opportunities for more in-depth coverage packages on sports that might not have got wide attention on the live linear coverage or streaming feeds.
He points to the example of the women’s individual foil final on Sunday evening in which U.S. Tokyo gold medalist Lee Kiefer defended her title against compatriot Lauren Scruggs.
“We had two Americans competing in the finals. We can’t predict that but we were able to tell the story about a sport most people have no idea about and with athletes who are completely unknown to them. When you’re doing it live, you don’t have the opportunity to do that,” he says.
Beyond the sports and prime time coverage, the other big challenge was capturing the ambitious opening ceremony unfolding on the River Seine on Friday night across 12 tableaux capturing the spirit of France and also featuring headline performances by Lady Gaga and Céline Dion.
Zenkel will not comment on the polemics around the show, which is produced by the host country France and over which NBCU has no editorial control.
In addition to the coverage provided by the International Olympics Committee’s Olympics Broadcasting Services (OBS), NBCU had another 50 cameras on the river and around other venues such as the Team USA House and the Athletes Village.
“We want to give the audience the best possible view of what the local organizing committee has put on,” he says.
Scouting the studio
For Sheehan, the Paris operation began more than three years ago when he started to scout a location for the main studios.
He visited various rooftop sites across the city as well as a potential riverfront location, previously used by ESPN for the Euros soccer tournament coverage, but in the end decided the studios had to look onto the Eiffel Tower.
“For the American audience we really wanted to build the most iconic imagery that we could. Other things, the Arc de Triomphe, nothing resonates like the Eiffel Tower. We really wanted Eiffel… One of the big factors in our initial production meetings is that we wanted Paris to be a character in our shows,” says Sheehan. “We approached the folks here and went through a very long negotiation and shook hands at a table right here two years ago.”
He and his crews could not get into the museum until after France’s July 14 Bastille Day celebrations, just 12 days before opening ceremony on July 26.
“It meant we had just 10 days to do a setup, that normally would have taken 24 days. We had crews working 16 hours a day, scenic and lighting,” says Sheehan.
Beyond the Musée de l’Homme studio hub, there is also a studio in the temporary TV tower across the street for NBC’s daytime and late-night shows as well as an indoor studio on the second floor of the museum.
“We call that the Museum Studio. We set that up for eventualities such as somebody playing incredibly loud music all night long.”
The operation also has a studio at the International Broadcasting Center (IBC)as well as 20 live view cameras across the city and a position at the Team USA House, where an NBC Sport team is producing TikTok content.
There are also another five Olympics-dedicated studios in the U.S.
Sheehan, who has worked on 10 Olympics, has built a core team over the years, many of whom are veterans of the games too, such as senior technical manager Chip Adams who is on his 16th Olympics.
“Since Sochi (2014), we’ve dealt with the same lighting team, the same scenic fabrication, the same designer, the same stagehands, the same studio crew. It’s the only way we can succeed. They’re freelancers from all over… Poland, the UK, the U.S. It’s the exact same team that does the World Cup, because we help our associates at Telemundo with infrastructure as well,” says Sheehan.
“We all know one another’s sensibilities and can have frank conversations with each other, wonderful disagreements and then you come together to a consensus to that’s what we’re going to do and move on.”
The 2024 Olympics will mark an important test for Peacock as its streams the different sports live and in their entirety alongside NBC’s more traditional coverage.
The platform split is not dissimilar to European Olympics audiovisual rights holder Warner Bros. Discovery, which is playing out its coverage out on its linear channels Eurosport 1 and 2, as well as on platforms Max and Discovery+.
One major difference is that under its rights deal, WBD is obliged to share 200 hours of coverage with European legacy public broadcasters which retain a strong connection with their domestic audiences and are often still regarded as the go-to for Olympics coverage.
As the sole entity offering coverage in the U.S., and with NBC’s long history of covering the games on, NBCU does not face that challenge.
“We haven’t had an unrestricted summer Olympics since Rio, and between then and 2024, the world has shifted,” says Zenkel. “Most of the streaming is people watching NBC on Peacock and they’re watching on a television. We certainly believe, given how the Olympics have consistently performed that the audience is going to come back in all its glory.”
A week into the games, the viewing figures suggest Zenkel’s optimism is not unfounded. The presentation of the opening ceremony on Saturday drew 32.3M views across key NBCU platforms, against 17.7M for the opening of the Tokyo Olympics.
The first Tuesday, which saw Simone Biles made a victorious comeback during the women’s gymnastics team final alongside Suni Lee, Jade Carey, Jordan Chiles, and Hezly Rivera, delivered 34.7M viewers, against 18.4M for the opening Tuesday of the Tokyo games.
Milan-Cortina & L.A.
With Paris in full swing, the NBC Sports teams already have their eyes on L.A. in 2028, and before that that the winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina in 2026.
Zenkel says the UBCU has working with LA28 team since 2018.
“It’s been very focused on the commercial side. We have a partnership with them to jointly sell video sponsorship, which has been five years in the making but other interaction has also been fantastic. We will succeed off the great partnership that we’ve formed,” he says.
He says it is too early to talk location details as the committee has yet to announce all the venues, let alone the sports program.
“They call themselves the ‘no-build Olympics’. They already have more venues than they need, which is absurd because there are 30 venues. L.A. is so vast in terms of opportunities. They’ll have a couple of things outside.”
Sheehan focus is on the MiIan-Cortina winter games, which are challenge of the some 260 mile (400Km) distance between the two main sites.
“We were then in February. We did some scouts and looked at some venues. We’re probably going to go back potentially into an IBC setting to deal with the broad distances.”
Gesue says the NBC Sports teams have been prepping coverage plans for Milan-Cortina.
“We’re already forming those plans. There are things you need to get set two plus years in advance so we spent some time on that over the winter and the spring to get ourselves far enough along, so we can put it in the drawer and come back to it in September,” he says.
Looking to the L.A. games in 2008, Gesue acknowledges NBCU will not be able to take exactly the same editorial approach of introducing the U.S. city to Americans, in the way coverage has focused on Paris and French culture for the 2024 games.
He suggests that L.A. still holds a special fascination for U.S. viewers.
“L.A. is a domestic game. It presents a different opportunity. L.A. is creativity, it’s Hollywood. You see all the celebrities in the venues. There is going to be even more of that in L.A.”
