BROADCAST SPOTLIGHT: OLYMPIC GAMES FROM NBC STAMFORD

From Stamford to Milan, SMT powers NBC's Olympic coverage

Thanks to Bailey Wagoner, Events Operations Specialist, and Matt Howard, EPM, for contributing to this report and to Shaun Bales for the highlight reel.

While the Olympic Games action is happening in Italy, much of the broadcast magic is actually orchestrated from NBC Sports headquarters in Stamford, Conn., at the heart of NBC’s operations, supporting nearly 2,000 NBC Sports staff members responsible for more than 7,000 hours of programming.

At the truck dock outside NBC Studios, a dedicated trailer houses the arsenal of data visualization and on-screen enhancements that power coverage of Milan Cortina 2026. From SMT heart-rate monitoring to scorebug integrations and advanced data visualizations, our technology helps bring viewers closer to the athletes and the competition.

“The beauty of the Olympics,” noted NBC’s coordinating team, “is that we get to try new technologies because there’s so much excitement and momentum around the Games.” 

In Stamford, SMT’s six-person team works from midnight through late afternoon to support live broadcasts. Reporting to Stass Iordanov, Director, Event Development, and Jeff Carella, Sr. Business Development Manager, the team ensures real-time graphics data is accurately delivered to NBC’s Chyron systems. Behind every score that appears on screen is a complex network of software, engineering and coordination.

“As sports, scoring, technology and broadcasting have all adapted and improved with time, SMT has been able to come up with more and more creative and analytical kinds of software and scoring systems,” said Bailey Wagoner, Events Operations Specialist.

Each Olympic sport requires unique scoring logic and engineering support with no two the same. SMT’s configurable software applications are tailored to the specific demands of each discipline.

From Milan to Stamford: Seamless Global Collaboration

SMT personnel are deployed both on-site in Milan and remotely in Stamford. In Milan, Kayla Harris, Matthew Mick, and Jackson Jones work with Stass and Jeff directly at the International Broadcast Centre, connecting to SMT servers and coordinating with Omega, the official scoring provider. In Stamford, Matt Howard, Bailey Wagoner, Jordan Allen, Jordan Lowy, Susan Walker and Aaron Durant manage sport assignments and ensure seamless data flow into NBC’s graphics ecosystem.

SMT provides interfaced scoring graphics for bobsled, luge, skeleton, skiing, snowboarding, speed skating, short track, and figure skating. That includes presenting athlete name and rank prior to runs, real-time scores, leaderboard standings, results, board stances, trick styles, hometowns, and evolving weather and course conditions. Each venue is equipped with TVI laptops that transmit interfaced data to NBC’s graphics systems, and most of the five control rooms operate with nearly identical setups to maintain consistency and reliability.

The laptop on the right displays SMT software including competition order, rank, and scoring specifications.

SMT’s primary support team for NBC Sports’ Stamford coverage, from left to right: Jordan Allen (alpine skiing), Jordan Lowy (bobsled, skeleton, luge), Aaron Durant (heart rate monitor), Matt Howard (snowboarding, half pipe, slopestyle), Bailey Wagoner (freestyle skiing, aerials, moguls) and Susan Walker (skating, short track).

IN THE NEWS: CAROLINA ALUMNI REVIEW

The pulse behind the Olympics

By Lauren Schutter, Carolina Alumni Review
Feb. 12, 2026

On the surface, it’s the kind of broadcast moment you can miss if you blink: a small graphic tucked near the corner of the TV, a number climbing fast, a pulse you can almost feel through the screen.

But inside that number is the story of the Olympics — not just the athlete who trained for years to skate, slide or jump under the brightest lights, but the people who helped them get there. The parents holding their breath in the stands. The coach living and dying on every split-second decision. The sibling watching someone they’ve known forever suddenly become a global name.

That’s where Jackson Jones ’18 comes in. He is on-site in Milan for the Olympics with Durham-based SMT, helping power a biometric initiative that brings fans closer to the most human part of sport: emotion.

SMT works behind the scenes across some of the biggest stages in sports, such as the Super Bowl, NASCAR and horse racing, to provide data services, software development and hardware solutions for major television network sports broadcasters and leagues. Jones works on everything from enhanced graphics and statistics integration to real-time tracking across events.

That data can mean an entire ecosystem: timing feeds, tracking devices, tags on athletes in certain sports and systems that translate raw numbers into clean, readable information that viewers trust. In the Olympics environment, where every hundredth of a second matters and every graphic needs to match the moment perfectly, that translation has to be seamless.

One major part of SMT’s Olympic footprint is “interface data” — taking official timekeeping and results and converting them into broadcast-ready elements.

Jones explained that SMT’s team connects to Omega Timing, the Olympics’ official timing provider, then routes that information through software tools so it can appear in the specific formats that NBC Sports requested. From there, SMT’s developers code the data to match graphics packages that appear across multiple venues and sports.

Their Olympic operation is split between the International Broadcast Centre and remote production support in the United States, with staff working out of Stamford, Connecticut.

IN THE  NEWS: WRAL

Durham company uses biometric tech to capture fan excitement at 2026 Winter Games

A UNC-Chapel Hill grad and employee at Sports Media Technology (SMT), based in Durham, uses biometric data to display fan excitement at the Winter Olympics

While supporting the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan, Jackson Jones was interviewed by a student reporter and videographer from the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media as part of the CBC-UNC News Media Multiplatform Fellowship in partnership with WRAL-TV.

EVENT SPOTLIGHT: DAYTONA 500

Vectors perform flawlessly during testing at Daytona 500

Thanks to Paulus Weemaes Director, Motorsports, for contributing to this report and to Shaun Bales for the highlight reel.

The 2026 Daytona 500 marked a defining moment for SMT’s vector testing in at NASCAR. Across all three national series, SMT’s next-generation vectors performed perfectly. After months of rigorous testing by development and operations, the result was clear: NASCAR and its broadcast partners once again have the most precise, reliable location data in the sport.

"The new vectors hit highest accuracy 99.9% of the time and are no longer affected by external interference factors such as in-car cameras," shared Motorsports Director Paulus Weemaes. "A huge win thanks to the hard work that our Development and Operations teams put into the new units. All the testing these last months brought great success. Going forward, we have full confidence that NASCAR and the broadcasters will have the best location data again at their disposal."

Lead engineers Johnny Wen and Isaac Walker-Stern at work on the GPS vector project.

Motorsports Communication Controller Clint Harris works in SMT's production truck, manning the nerve center for the GPS vector system, collecting, processing and monitoring all location and telemetry data.

BROADCAST SPOTLIGHT: NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series

The CW season revs up with new sponsorship automation and telemetry tools for Daytona

Thanks to TJ Zimmermann, Remote Tech, for contributing to this report and to Shaun Bales for the highlight reel.

For the second straight year, SMT supported The CW’s coverage of the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series season opener at Daytona, building on a growing partnership as The CW settles into its role as the series’ broadcaster. The event was powered by a coordinated effort between SMT’s on-site team in Fremont and a three-person remote crew in Charlotte, delivering the data, graphics and sponsorship integrations that drove the broadcast.

As Remote Tech TJ Zimmermann explains, SMT’s support has expanded significantly year over year. With SMT’s vectors returning to NASCAR, the team leaned heavily into telemetry, a motorsports staple, giving viewers deeper insight into driver performance. At the same time, GEMLive featured a host of new sponsorship-related enhancements to meet The CW’s expanded sponsors for Daytona. One of the biggest workflow improvements came from a new automated feature tied to onboard cameras. SMT developed sponsored graphic elements that automatically trigger whenever an in-car camera feed appears on screen, streamlining operations for both SMT and The CW graphics team.

GEMLive and GEMStat: SMT’s GEMLive application once again powered the on-air leaderboard and a wide range of explanatory race graphics, while GEMStat ingested and organized everything from driver bios to real-time lap data and running order. Data was captured on-site in Fremont and transmitted to Charlotte, where TJ ran GEMLive for air output and Jackson Snider operated GEMStat to manage incoming data.

This year’s event also brought a significant branding shift. After more than a decade with Xfinity as title sponsor, the series transitioned to O’Reilly Auto Parts. That change required extensive updates across graphics packages and software interfaces, with both on-site operations and engineering teams working behind the scenes to ensure a seamless transition on air.

“CW was super happy with how our first race went this year,” said TJ. “Last year, since it was their first time as a network ever broadcasting a motorsports race, things were extremely chaotic. This year, everyone from the CW graphics team to the producer of the show have said that things were way smoother than last year."

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Events and Remote Teams

We are staffing 13 events this week. Safe travels to all!

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