“It all depends on the level of risk,” he said. “If it’s the prime-time show, we could get on the air about six different ways. If it’s the stream of table tennis, there might be a single thread.”

Sending so much video to the United States, a step also taken for the Beijing Games, also allows for more work to be done there, saving money for NBC. Five control rooms in New York are dedicated to the Games’ coverage, as are dozens of editors and producers. It is almost as if the engineers have erased the Atlantic Ocean off the map — but there is still a 3.5-second delay for the video to and fro.

High-end editing work still takes place mostly on site. In Sydney, NBC had 22 TOES, shorthand for what the staff called the Trusty Old Editing System. Here it has two. These linear editing suites have been almost completely superseded by software editing systems made by Avid. There are 45 Avid systems in London, up from three in Sydney. (Avid technicians are in the hallway in case anything goes awry.)

The editing gear and 40,000 other pieces of equipment are shipped in and out by an operations group led by Mazza’s counterpart John Fritsche. Some of the equipment, like the shock-mounted platforms for servers called RIBS, short for racks in a box, has been around since the games in Sydney. Mazza led the charge toward reusable infrastructure, which greatly reduces the amount of wiring that has to be done each time the network sets up in a new city.

Owing to advances in technology, some of the infrastructure has shrunk as the years have passed. There are fewer RIBS, for instance, because video feeds are now better compressed. And there are far fewer discs with old footage in storage. “This room is half the size it used to be,” Zenkel said as he walked by the discs, most of which were from the Beijing Games. Older footage (useful, say, to show past gold medal wins) is back in the United States, having been made accessible through a robotic tape server for the first time.

Other pieces of equipment are reused elsewhere in the NBC universe. A $400,000 audio console for a control room, for instance, will be installed after the Games at the network’s new NBC Sports facility in Stamford, Conn.

“We don’t buy it unless we know where it’s going postgame,” Mazza said.

NBC, as the biggest Olympic broadcaster by far, occupies about one-fifth of the broadcast center here. Drilling and hammering was still going on this week in the mammoth building, but those were the sounds of other countries’ networks; NBC seemed ready, aside from the occasional router outage. By the water cooler, there was a video conferencing camera for face-to-face meetings with colleagues in New York. On the whiteboard was the British expression of the day: “drop a clanger,” meaning “to mess up.”