New NBCU Telemundo HQ Preps For Future

One year down and one to go until completion of the massive new NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises headquarters in Miami that will serve as home to the production and broadcast operations for all of the Spanish-language network’s entities.

The 475,000-square-foot facility located on a 21-acre parcel of land on the west side of Miami will bring the Telemundo Network, Telemundo Studios, Telemundo International and NBCUniversal International, as well as the NBC Universo cable network and digital media operations under one roof.

The headquarters, one of a new generation of greenfield broadcast centers popping up around the country, will come online as the industry is undergoing a major transition from baseband SDI to IP.  

“I am very proud of this project because we are leaning into some of the new technology standards,” says Jeff Mayzurk. SVP of operations and technology for NBCU Telemundo Enterprises. “We think it’s going to pay off for us in terms of flexibility and futureproofing.”

NBCU Telemundo broke ground on the $250 million headquarters in February 2016. Since then, the project has progressed from an empty lot to a complete, waterproof building shell with work now underway on its interior.

From its earliest technical design phases, NBCU Telemundo aimed to maximize flexibility by “going essentially with a pure IP core network,” says Mayzurk, who adds there are provisions for SDI in the facility where needed.

“One of the major reasons for doing that is to get format independence,” he says. “We wanted to be able to go to 4K and higher frame rates and high dynamic range and whatever the next standard beyond UHD-1 is.”

The centerpiece of executing that strategy is IP routing across a fully meshed IP network.

Although Mayzurk declined to identify specific vendors providing technology for the new facility, he painted a striking picture of why IP routing is essential.

“If this were an SDI router in a traditional architecture, it would be about 8,000 inputs by 2,000 outputs,” he says. “Obviously, you can’t make an SDI router that big.”

However, with IP there are some efficiencies so a more accurate comparison to a traditional switching matrix is probably closer to 4,000 by 1,500, he says. Even so, that’s beyond the reach of an SDI router.

While the necessity of IP routing to support so many sources and destinations was clear, it was a bit less certain initially whether separate essences — audio, video and metadata — or the IP equivalent of an SDI signal with embedded essences would be used.

“We initially had a lot of engineering discussions around the encapsulation of audio and video — the encapsulation of essence in IP,” says Mayzurk. “We ultimately eliminated [SMPTE] 2022-6.”

While the approach offers some benefits, like support of higher bitrate interfaces and duplex signaling, SMPTE 2022-6 “is still a legacy signaling and serialization method,” he says.

“It felt like if we were going to make the leap to IP, doing it with [2022]-6 was doing it with one hand tied behind our backs.”

What was needed was a standards-based protocol to transport elementary streams, he says. Thus, NBU Telemundo was attracted to the Video Services Forum’s TR-03 protocol, which is serving as the foundation of the SMPTE ST-2110 standard.

“We feel pretty good about the progress the SMPTE 2110 committee is making, and we plan to go live with a 2110 plant,” he says.

When completed, the facility’s IP mesh network will transport elementary streams and other data from 13 major studios — ranging in size from 800 to 8,000 square feet — for major shows and daily broadcasts, as well as smaller insert and digital production studio spaces; seven separate video production control rooms and seven audio production control rooms; hundreds of workstations in a large newsroom workspace; and major post-production suites, including those for general purpose editing, craft editing, color grading and audio editing and finishing, he says.

In all, the facility will easily be able to handle the more than 4,000 hours of programming produced per year today by Telemundo with room to grow, Mayzurk says.

Another major technical goal for the new facility is to be “highly virtualized,” that is, running broadcast functions once available only on standalone hardware, such as encoding, on commodity servers.

Playout servers, production control automation and graphics — to some extent — will be virtualized at the new facility, he says.

“We are still working with vendors on graphics,” Mayzurk adds. “We are in early trials with them. There is still some work to be done, but we are pretty bullish on virtualization of graphics.”

Mayzurk adds he has been “pleasantly surprised” by the cooperation he has received from traditional broadcast vendors in the pursuit of virtualization.

Special emphasis is also being given to automating the reconfiguration of production resources, he says.

“Some facilities are good at being able to turn control rooms quickly and repurpose the infrastructure to support different types of configurations,” he says. “We want to have all of that driven by automation.”

While much effort has gone into designing the facility to be flexible, workflow also has been a major consideration.

Having the luxury of building a greenfield facility meant that from the very earliest design stages NBCU Telemundo could take into consideration how people will move through the new facility and design a workflow to support that, Mayzurk says.

What that translates into in terms of building design is a very large workspace for Telemundo’s various news teams and technical operations in the center of the building on the second floor, he says.

“All the media coming in or going out of the facility, whether they are live feeds, satellite receives or files being delivered, are accessible by those teams at the heart of the facility,” he says.

A stairway in the middle of the area will connect this centralized newsroom and technical operations center with all of the production space, including the control rooms, the edit rooms and the studios.

“We really designed it based on the way people work to support not only their access to the technology but also to make sure they have access to content and other people they need to collaborate with,” he says.

While the new NBCU Telemundo headquarters isn’t due to be finished until the first quarter of 2018, that doesn’t mean the broadcaster isn’t already at work creating content for the future.

“We’ve started to acquire for some of our scripted dramas in 4K and HDR,” Mayzurk says. “We think HDR is going to provide a big impact to the viewer. We are building the capability to acquire everything in the highest possible quality so that when the distribution standards catch up we have a library of content ready to distribute.”

That preparation, however, extends beyond having 4K content in the can. It also entails being ready for a 4K, HDR future from the moment the new NBCU Telemundo headquarters comes online, he says.

To stay up to date on all things tech, follow Phil Kurz on TVNewsCheck’s Playout tech blog here. And follow him on Twitter: @TVplayout.