Live From Connecticut, It’s The Paris Olympics: NBCUniversal Embraces Remote Production As Covid-Shaped Path To Viewers

deadline.com:

Watching a hard-fought badminton match between China and Japan, NBCUniversal‘s Andrew Siciliano had an urgent off-mic question for his research staff. “Is the winner of a game the first one to 15 or first to 21?” he asked.

Papers were shuffled, device screens swiped. As one of two hosts of Gold Zone, the popular curated show on Peacock spotlighting dramatic matchups and moments at the Summer Olympics, Siciliano’s task, like that of his 2,000 colleagues at NBCU’s production hub in Stamford, CT, is to quickly get up to speed on an event happening some 3,600 miles away and then present it to viewers in an authoritative, engaging way. (Badminton games – they’re not “sets” like in tennis or squash – go to 21 points, the researchers affirmed.) Asked in an interview about his approach to Gold Zone, which is a close cousin of his former studio gig, hosting NFL Sunday Ticket Red Zone on DirecTV, Siciliano described it as “all-encompassing – it has to be.

I think I speak for everyone in the building when I say that it takes over your entire life.” A recent visit to NBCU’s Stamford production hub offered a look at the staff’s full immersion, and also left no doubt where NBCU’s new center of gravity is for live sports.

Wherever events may be taking place, all roads lead here, to an airplane hangar-sized outpost off I-95, about 40 miles north of 30 Rock.