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Snell Group announced that its Alchemist Ph.C-HD standards converter has been selected by the NBC Olympics for the production of 2014 Olympic Winter Games scheduled to happen in Sochi, Russia during February 2014. This is the sixth consecutive time that NBC Olympics is using Snell converters for producing Olympic Winter Games.

In a release, Robert Rowe, chief technology officer at Snell, said, “With Alchemist Ph.C-HD content can be exchanged internationally across standards boundaries at the highest possible quality and with virtually no conversion artifacts, an important factor for challenging moving images, such as those we’ll see throughout the 2014 Sochi Winter Games. As NBC Olympics brings coverage from Russia to the viewers in the United States, Alchemist Ph.C will assure that the images viewers see maintain the sharp clarity and detail that help to make sports broadcasts so exciting and engaging.”

A four time winner of Emmy Awards, Alchemist standards converter deploys Snell’s innovative Ph.C technology for enabling precise motion measurement. This allows for delivering undisturbed detailed conversions for the most dynamic of the contents. For the Sochi Olympic Winter Games, NBC Olympics will use Alchemist system for converting frame rate from 50Hz to the 59.94Hz television standards in the US.

Speaking of the association with Snell, David Mazza, senior vice president of engineering at NBC Olympics, said “This marks the 6thOlympics we have used Snell Alchemist converters.  We have always been able to count on the best possible conversion of the native 50Hz content, which assures us that our viewers will see the best pictures from the 2014 Olympic Winter Games on the networks of NBCUniversal.”

NBC Olympics will utilize a total of 25 Snell converters with the majority being Alchemist Ph.C-HD units embedded with FileFlow option to enable easy input and output of various broadcast file formats. Further, NBC Olympics can also opt for upgrading to the new Alchemist On Demand, a value-added service that offers seamless access to signal processing algorithms.

Snell Group is engaged in providing end-to-end solutions for global media houses and other broadcasters to create, manage, and streamline content distribution in a multiple screen environment. The company specializes in Live TV and TV Everywhere applications enabling media companies to broadcast content across multiple platforms.

NBC Olympics, a business division of NBC Sports Group, is engaged in the production, programming and promotion of the Olympics coverage for NBC Universal (News - Alert). The company is known for the highest viewership in the history of US television for its unprecedented quality of Olympics coverage.