Tidbits About The IBC

The MMC is the home to the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) and the Main Press Centre (MPC). This model of combining both in one place started in Salt Lake City in 2002. They liked this model and the Italians decided to do the same.

This photo was taken outside the main gate to the MMC at Lingotto. This is the site of an old Fiat car factory and the roof of the main building (not in frame) has an old race track on top. The assembly line worked horizontally and vertically. When the car was assembled, it exited on the roof and they test drove it. In fact, the roof of this building was used in the 1969 movie The Italian Job. The Lingotto building is now an office building, shopping mall and conference centre.

Taking up 32,000 square metres of the 52,000 square metre (or 559,000 sq. ft) MMC is the International Broadcast Centre. The heart of the television coverage for the XX Olympic Winter Games. Basically all the rights holding broadcasters (CBC, NBC, BBC etc) have based their crews here for the duration of the games. TOBO (Torino Olympic Broadcasting Organization -- my employer), also based here, provides the world feeds of all Olympic events to the rights holders.

The IBC is basically a maze of hallways like the one seen here. Just take a walk from here to the exit (about 200m from where this photo was taken) and you'll hear almost every imaginable language being spoken mixed in with a lot of English and Italian.

The security in this building is very tight. In fact, there are three levels of police that guard the entrances and hallways. The local Turin Polizia, La Guardia di Finanza (a police force that guards economic centres and financial institutions), and the Cabarinieri (national police force). Anytime you exit the MMC and reenter, your accreditation is checked (twice), all bags are x-rayed and you are sent through metal detectors.
Just taking this photo in the hallway, I was approached by the Polizia and told not to take photos of the positions of any uniformed officer. They let this photo go because it didn't really reveal anything.

Once you get into the MMC, you can head to either the MPC or the IBC. Depending on your accreditation. If you're not a rightsholder (i.e. CTV, ABC, basically not CBC, NBC etc) you can't enter the IBC, but you can enter the MPC. Rightsholders and TOBO personnel can access both. My accreditation allows me to enter both AND any venue at the Games. Most people assigned to work a specific sport for TOBO are only allowed into their venue. I'm special.

Once you enter the IBC, you pass various information desks and pass Master Control.

This section of Master Control is called "Contribution." They monitor the signals coming into the IBC from the venues. They check the incoming video and audio and make sure it meets a specific standard before it gets sent to...

"Distribution" (left part of photo) Here they equalize the audio and video levels before they get sent to "Transmission" (right part of photo) where the signals are sent to the rightsholders to air on their networks.
This is HDTV Master Control. There are only a handful of rightsholders that are actually broadcasting the games in HD.

Here's a little map with the layout of the IBC.

As you can see, NBC takes up most of the floor space at the IBC. CBC a close second. I am based in the section called BOC, Broadcast Operations Centre.

That's a sum of it all.