For decades, the pinnacle of sports broadcasting was defined by how many satellite trucks one could park outside a stadium. But as we head toward the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics starting this week, that era is officially in the rearview mirror.

NBCUniversal Media LLC has chosen Cisco Systems Inc. to deliver the AI networking technology for the Peacock Network’s “all-IP production” of the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics. The games take place in Italy Feb. 6-22, followed by the Paralympics March 6-15. Though Cisco and NBC have a longstanding relationship, this deployment represents a significant shift in how “Big Iron” events are produced. This is something information technology leaders should be watching as the headline is about more than the Olympics; it’s about transitioning the mission-critical, high bandwidth operations from a legacy closed network to an all-IP, AI-managed framework.

The Cisco-driven broadcast and online content will include many of the same features the partnership delivered during the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, including:

• Live coverage of events during the day on the NBC broadcast network
• Coverage of the entire Olympiad on the Peacock streaming service
• A nightly program, “Primetime in Milan,” showcasing top performances and events
• Coverage across multiple cable and digital platforms

VXLAN to make Olympics debut

NBC Sports will use Cisco’s Virtual Extensible LAN or VXLAN technology to prioritize operational efficiency and flexibility, effectively dissolving the geographic barriers that restrict live production, per the Cisco announcement. In past Games, production was often hamstrung by physical distance — certain tasks had to happen on-site because the network couldn’t handle the latency or the “layer 2” requirements of broadcast equipment.

Cliff Ryan, NBCUniversal’s vice president of network engineering, said the network has expanded its ASR-based MPLS Segment Routes WAN to accommodate expanding traffic, which will ensure NBC Sports can meet on-premises and hybrid cloud workflows. To achieve this, the network is employing Cisco CrossWorks Network Controller, or CNC, and WAN Automation Engine, or WAE. Ryan said this tooling gives NBC network engineers the ability to analyze how traffic moves across its critical backbone and provides best-in-class failure analysis and capacity planning insight.

What I like about the intersection of sports and tech is that it often provides a proving ground for different technology. For the enterprise IT leaders, this is a great proof of concept for the “borderless” data center. If one can produce a live, 4K global broadcast across an ocean with zero packet loss, the hybrid cloud latency issues most organizations face are suddenly much more solvable.

By the numbers: The IP media explosion

The shift we are seeing at the Olympics mirrors the pivot happening in the networking industry. The Business Research Co. found the global Live IP Broadcast Equipment market is expected to reach $1.9 billion in 2026, growing at a compound annual growth rate of over 15%.

The acceleration is driven by the below three pillars:

1. Bandwidth demands: A single uncompressed 8K video stream now consumes roughly 48 gigabits per second. Traditional broadcast cables or SDI cannot scale to meet that demand.
2. Operational efficiency: Moving to IP allows broadcasters to use commercial off-the-shelf hardware, reducing proprietary hardware costs by an estimated 30% to 50% over long-term cycles.
3. The AI inflection point: AI-driven analytics and automated “Gold Zone” highlights can’t run on legacy systems since they don’t have the capacity or the agility. IP is the only viable option for scaling AI.

AI networking: From ‘nice to have’ to ‘table stakes’

Though “AI Networking” is still on the roadmap of many companies, for the Olympics the future is now, as NBC’s use of Cisco’s CNC and WAE to manage its backbone demonstrates.

The entire Olympics will be streamed live on Peacock while simultaneously feeding 4K linear broadcasts to millions of homes. Human engineers can’t troubleshoot congested links fast enough to deliver a consistent experience. The network must be self-healing and predictive. NBC’s engineering team is using these tools for improved failure analysis — essentially simulating outages before they happen to ensure the “five nines” of reliability that a $7.75 billion rights deal demands.

Why this matters to IT leaders

The takeaway for IT leaders outside of the media space is that the network is no longer just “plumbing” – for many companies, it is the business. Whether the network supports a hospital system, a global retail chain or a financial services firm, the requirements are converging with those of NBC Sports. Modern network requirements are:

• Zero-loss determinism: In a world of real-time data, a dropped packet is a lost customer or a failed transaction.
• Simplified orchestration: As NBC integrates on-prem and hybrid cloud workflows, the ability to manage both via a single dashboard (such as Cisco’s Nexus Dashboard) is the only way to correlate network issues with business metrics.
• Security at scale: With the eyes of the world on Milan, the threat surface is massive. Moving to an IP fabric allows for granular, zero-trust policy enforcement at the flow level — something legacy networks never could achieve.

Final thought

As we watch the opening ceremony from San Siro Stadium Friday Feb. 6, remember that the triumph of athletics you’re watching is enabled by modernized, software-defined infrastructure. With the right AI networking foundation, NBC Sports will be able to move mountains of data as easily as a downhill skier moves through powder.

For those in IT world, there is a lesson here: If the network isn’t ready for the “AI era,” you’re at the starting gate while the competition is halfway down the mountain. AI is coming and it requires a different type of network to enable it.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Photo: Olympics.com