For those of you who are actually watching the 2026Winter Olympics, by now, you've heard the buzzing.
From the luge track, to the speed skating arena, to the downhill mountain,NBC and its partnershavedeployed 15 first-person view (FPV) drones and 10 traditional dronesthat are providing content to the Olympic Broadcasting Services department.
The FPVs are providing angles that make you feel like you're flying down a luge track, but it also sounds like you have a swarm of bees flying out of your surround-sound speakers.
Is it too much noise? Do we need to hear a swarm of bees every time a competitor launches down a mountain? That is a question that has divided viewers. Based on a completely unscientific Twitter poll conducted Wednesday, the split is as tight as a presidential election.
According to OutKick Executive Producer Aaron Spielberg and OutKick Senior Producer Tim McHugh, NBC has the option to block the drone sound channel from the audio you're hearing during events, but, so far, they haven't.
Why not? Based on the unscientific poll, it turns out that many of you seem to like the enhanced audio aspects that come along with the drone flying behind a luge competitor.
On a Reddit audio engineering page, this very question is playing out among experts. "The sound is left there on purpose, you have to hear what you see," a Reddit user argues. "When there is a helicopter cam, they playback a helicopter rotor sample, because the audience is expecting that. If the snow is super soft, they playback skiing sounds, because otherwhise (SIC) audience won't hear that and be confused."
The theory is that you have to know that a drone is capturing that camera angle.
"That would remove most of the ski spray and carving noise too, a low pass tool is a blunt instrument," another audio expert argues on a skiing Reddit page. "Drone buzz is extremely wideband and frequency shifts all the time.Real-timenoise reduction good enough to remove the drone sound (without heavy artificating) barely exists, and definitely isn’t integrated into the live broadcast chain yet."
The quick poll that we ran shows that NBC might be onto something. Not enough people hate the buzzing to make this a loser for the network. Weekend ratings were "way up" over the 2022 Winter Games,according to Hollywood Reporter. The Super Bowl on NBC might've had something to do with that, but don't forget that the2022 Winter Games were a disaster.The Beijing Olympics drew the lowest U.S. ratings— ever.
Source: The Latest & Most Breaking News With OutKick
