Celebrating 10 years of Olympics partnership with NBC

As the 2018 Olympic Winter Games get underway in PyeongChang, South Korea, Cisco is proud to once again play a key role in delivering content from the world’s largest sporting event to billions of fans around the globe cheering on their countrymen and women. It was announced today that NBC Olympics has selected Cisco to provide IP video contribution and distribution solutions, along with networking and security solutions, for its production of the Games, which takes place February 8 – February 25. In addition, the NBC teams will use Cisco’s always-on collaboration solutions – including Telepresence, Spark and Spark Board – to connect its remote and on-site production teams.

For the past decade, Cisco has partnered with NBC Olympics in a similar capacity for each Olympics since the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing. For the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro, Cisco and NBC powered more than 3.5B online video views, equating to 170,000 hours of online video content and a staggering 130M hours of mobile online video content. It comes as no surprise that mobile continues to dominate the content consumption landscape – the 2017 Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI) projects that mobile data traffic will grow sevenfold from 2016 to 2021, representing a compound annual growth rate of 46 percent. The same study predicts that by 2021, a whopping 82 percent of all IP traffic will be video content.

When it comes to the Olympic Games, fans worldwide have shown an insatiable appetite for not only a growing quantity of content, but also new ways to experience and digest the video as well. For the first time ever in PyeongChang, NBC will air more than 50 hours of live virtual reality coverage of the Games, including the Opening and Closing Ceremonies, figure skating, hockey finals and more.

As media companies look to the future for new and more innovative ways to produce content, they’ll continue to require technology partners capable of executing them. Which is where Cisco comes in. By providing a world-class cloud-based networking infrastructure and the industry-leading cybersecurity to support it, Cisco will enable NBC to deliver gold-medal worthy moments to fans around the world all Games long.