The folks at
VER shared some fun facts with us regarding the NBC broadcast:
It takes a lot of people power and equipment to produce the 835 hours of glitzy television coverage...While setting up for the big event, our NBC brethren compiled an impressive list of the sheer numbers involved in creating such a monumental 16-day broadcast. Continue reading, and you'll see that there's a whole lot more to putting together an Olympics broadcast than meets the eye:
900,000 gigabytes of HD video storage
400,000' of video cable
230,000' of audio cable (43 miles)
155,980 meals served in 16 days
79,707 square feet compound space at 19 venues
68,286 cups of coffee and tea
50,000' of triax cable
46,912 room nights in 15 hotels and 97 apartments
22,000 donuts
18,730 lbs. of pasta ordered for the NBC commissary
15,000 blank videotapes
10,500' of fiber cable
10,000 archived video tapes
6,890 sets of Olympics schwag for the crew
2,500 color video monitors
2,168 NBC Olympic staff in Vancouver
835 hours of planned television coverage
800 hours of HD broadcast coverage at the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008
416 total hours of NBC coverage of the Torino Olympics, the previous record
385 laptop computers
200 video recorders and 100 video servers
127 printers
110 NBC cameras
51 HD video servers
28 NBC edit rooms
26 Semi trucks hauling equipment
5 Mobile units
1 Fixed-wing aircraft
1 helicopter
1st all-HD Olympic Winter Games
And according to Riedel...
32 communication nodes
13,000 two way radios