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A week is a long time in politics. But in Donald Trumps world, even a day can feel like an eon. On Tuesday last week, the United States approved the export of Nvidias H200 GPUsthe second-most advanced computer chips powering the generative AI revolutionto markets that include China. The decision was granted with caveats. Supplies could be forestalled if the U.S. began running short, for one thing. But it was an approval. Then, 24 hours later, the White House levied a 25% tariff against the same chips at the point theyre imported into the United States. That matters because, under the rules Trump instigated on Tuesday, all those H200 chips that could be exported to mainland China after being fabricated in Taiwan must first make their way to the United States to be tested before being re-exported to customers. That adds up to a bigger bill for Chinese tech companies wanting to import cutting-edge chips into their country. (To avoid this, China is building up its domestic AI chip development and manufacturing capacity, and recently issued its own counterban on the import and use of H200 chips.) But it also causes chaos for the chipmakers themselves. Because AI hardware is now the backbone of national competitiveness, even small shifts in U.S. trade policy ripple across trilliondollar markets and global supply chains. The latest chopping and changing is a total overhaul of the normal way of doing business, says Willy Shih, professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. Business, like sports, is conducted on a playing field, where there are rules and regulations, and also norms, he says. These days, with the tariff situation changing almost every day, I tell people to imagine being a coach of a football team, and the rules change every minute, Shih jokes. Thats what it feels like. The impact on markets from such uncertainty can be significant, he adds. When you see people hold up investments waiting for some stability, thats why. Its hard to make long-term investment commitments when the rules could change tomorrow. Because companies dont know the price theyre going to have to pay to bring goods into their factories, theyre often reluctant to splash the cash on new purchases. A series of chip-adjacent companies has previously complained about lower-than-expected orders because of unpredictable tariff policy. European lithography firm ASML missed expectations in the first quarter of 2025 by more than $1 billion thanks to tariff uncertainty, their CEO said at the time. And markets reflected the chaos of Trumps tariff about-turns this year immediately: Nvidia dropped more than 3% after the 25% levy was introduced, suggesting investors were jittery about the repeated policy pivots. The issue is that it isnt just buyers who are making those long-term commitments on spending. Chip manufacturers rely on trying to understand future demand in order to build out their production capacitysomething that can be imperilled with quick-moving changes to tariffs implemented by Trump. My general belief is that most, or frankly all, semiconductor management and actual visibility of what is going on with demand is precisely zero, says Stacy Rasgon, managing director and senior analyst at Bernstein. They have absolutely no idea. All they see are the orders in front of their face. Being able to ramp up or ramp down production capacity in such a geopolitical environment makes things even more challenging. And Nvidias H200 chips are particularly tricky to make, meaning that the companyalongside other manufacturers of major chips affected by the Trump tariff changeshas to think carefully about how it plans the buildout of factories and capacities. Less than a month ago, Nvidia was asking its suppliers if they could step up demand to account for H200 demand totalling 185% of the firms current stock levels. The situation puts more pressure on the people running chip companies, says Srividya Jandhyala, professor of management at ESSEC Business School, and changes the skills they need to navigate the constant changes. As companies find themselves and their products squarely in the midst of geopolitical tensions, the job description of their top managers has changed, he says, pointing to the way that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has had to mutate how he works. His job today is about being an effective corporate diplomat, crisscrossing the world to convince policymakers that his companys products have a place in the vision policymakers have for their countries, Jandhyala says. But that vision may have to contend with rapidly shifting realities in a world where Donald Trumps whims dictate international trade.
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Gold Zone, NBC Sports whip-around coverage of the Olympics, didnt debut with the 2024 Summer Games in Paris. As far back as the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014, the network had experimented with the formatusing multiple screens to cover simultaneous live events, a technique that had been popularized since 2005 by RedZone coverage of the NFL. But Paris did mark the first time that Gold Zone had run on NBCUniversals streaming service Peacock, providing real-time coverage of all 39 sports with zero embargoes. Gold Zone will return on Peacock for the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Games in February. Molly Solomon: We decided to create a new class of Olympics programming. We wanted to take a format that sports fans were acquainted with, NFL RedZone whip-around coverage, and pitch it to hardcore sports fans to watch the Olympics like that. Wed never given the audience a front-row seat to everything that was happening at once. Amy Rosenfeld: NBC declared, We are not going to hold anything back. Nothing is embargoed. Solomon: Ive never felt as much energy in an Olympics control room as I did in Gold Zone. [Illustrations: Michal Bednarski] Rosenfeld: That control room was not for the faint of heart. Solomon: The first day I walked in there, you could see it was a unique product. It was fast-paced, frenetic. I thought it could appeal to younger viewers. It was almost like FOMO: Youre scrolling your social feed, where you feel like youre catching up with what happened that day. Rosenfeld: A sports producers worst nightmare is when youre trending on Twitter. That is never good news. My sister texted me about two-thirds through day one and said, Hey, #Gold Zone is trending. And I thought, Oh God, Im going to have to go on LinkedIn and get another job and its all over for me and I should have gone to business school. Cohost Scott Hanson is known for his on-camera exuberance. On day three, while tracking several Americans in different sports who were simultaneously going for gold, he got so excited that he began pounding his desk and lacerated a finger on a stray binder clip. Hanson: I was bleeding all the way down to my wrist. It got into my dress shirt, splattered my notes. Sometimes I get carried away. The next day, everybody came to set with a Band-Aid on their right pinkie. Solomon: The secret to the success of Gold Zone is energy. It helps drive the fun. Hanson: I hope all of us have an injury-free Games in Milan. On August 5, 11 days into its Paris Olympics coverage, Peacock delivered the moment fans had begun clamoring for, bringing together on-screen for the first time the two famous RedZone hosts: Andrew Siciliano, afternoon host of the Games coverage, and Hanson, who was covering prime time. Rosenfeld: I didnt realize what cult figures those guys are and that the idea of the two of them kind of passing a baton and cohosting was going to shake the earth. Hanson: I always thought the majority of the sporting public didnt know there were two RedZones. [DirecTVs RedZone channel, with Siciliano, launched in 2005; NFL Networks RedZone, with Hanson, launched in 2009.] Siciliano: I knew it would resonate. My phone started blowing up. Not just with texts from friends and family but from people I hadnt heard from in years. The Spider-Man meme was popular, the two Spider- Men pointing at each other. Conjuring Anchorman, Siciliano tweeted, Ron Burgundy and Wes Mantooth couldnt do it, but Scott and I can. Which of course begs the question: Who is Ron and who is Wes? Siciliano: Ill let you decide whos Ron and whos Wes. Hanson: Im not biting on that. Siciliano: Theres not going to be a fight in the alley, and I dont think anyone is going to kill anyone with a trident. Hanson: I keep a trident in the closet just in case things get out of control.
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Several times during the mens final of the Madrid Open tennis tournament between Casper Ruud and Jack Draper last spring, TV viewers were treated to a remarkable camera perspective. They watched the match from just behind the baseline, effortlessly following the players movement step for step and glimpsing his perfect angle on the ball with every shot. With no discernible blur or delays, the smoothly flowing live footage had the hyper-real feel of a video game. [Video: Tennis TV] I love the footwork by the cameraman, wrote one YouTube commenter. The company now uses the comment in its investor pitch deck. In reality, these uncanny tracking shots didnt involve any human camera operators at all. No robotic cameras or drones, either. Instead they were generated, in real time, with a software-based camera system developed by startup Muybridge, based in Oslo. Founded by Hkon Espeland and Anders Tomren in 2020, Muybridge has spent nearly five years developing real-time computer vision technology that uses software to create a weightless camera, with no moving parts, that captures the speed and motion of live sports in a way that our eyes arent accustomed to. In the coming year, viewers of televised sports will get to see many more of these revelatory perspectivesboth in tennis and beyond. [Photo: courtesy Muybridge] Muybridge has shifted the paradigmtwice “Four hundred years of camera history is ending here, explains Espeland, standing beside a framed black-and-white portrait of motion-picture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, the companys namesake, at the companys headquarters in Oslos hip Grünerlkka neighborhood during Oslo Innovation Week last fall. I see a lot of resemblance [in what were doing] to what he did with sequenced triggers to actually create motion says Espeland. To create his groundbreaking images of a galloping white horse in the 1870s, the English American photographer set up a line of cameras that were triggered by a trip wire as the horse ran past them, creating multiple images that each captured a different phase of the horses stride; by overlapping the images, he made a picture that appeared to move. Its a similar way of thinking, says Espeland. How can you distribute sensors and use that data in a smart way? Espeland had a long history with automated systems; he started working on them as a 16-year-old apprentice on oil and gas rigs in the North Sea. After getting a masters degree in cybernetics and robotics, he joined a Norwegian company building robotic camera systems for live TV production. While there, he had an epiphany. With computational photography, we could get rid of 300 kilos of metal and robots, he says. It was like removing gravity. Were not covered by any physical limitation. Instead of using big, expensive cameras that you move to chase whatevers happening on the court or sports field, Muybridge puts hundreds of small, inexpensive video sensors all over the placeand uses software to create smooth tracking shots and conjure any angle on demand. [Photo: courtesy Muybridge] In practice, this looks like extra-long speaker bars packed with a row of oversize smartphone camera lenses. These arrays come in two-meter lengths that can be connected to form what amounts to a single continuous camera of virtually any length. We’re going to build future digital stadiums full-360, says Espeland. And unlike traditional cameras, which can obstruct spectators views at live events, Muybridges clamp unobtrusively to any wall or structure, capturing the action on the court, field, or rink unnoticed. Our biggest issue at the U.S. Open was that the coaches of the athletes sat on it, Espeland says. They didnt realize it was a camera along the ad boards. Made from commodity electronics components, the sensors themselves are relatively inexpensive. We are lucky that the consumer [electronics] and mobile industry consume so [many] cameras, says Espeland. Theyve taken the costs down. There’s a reason why there are three cameras on an iPhone now. Mobile phone makers have also advanced the capacity of computational photography, keeping the sensors largely unchanged while improving algorithms to create better pictures. Were piggybacking on that. To meet the demands of live broadcast, Muybridge brings an updated approach to the reconstruction of 3D images. The rest of the world has been throwing more and more compute at the problem, running math on the GPU layer to try to fill in the blanks, explains Espeland. Thats led to something much faster than it was 20 years ago, but it can still take eight minutes to process the images for a replay. Our focus has always been [doing it] in real time, and we wanted it to be able to run on a laptop, in the cloud, or on a mobile phone. Thats where all of those little cameras come in. We have more pixels, more angles, more overlap, says Espeland. That allows us to have a cleaner mathematical approach to determine exact color, perspective, and all of those things. Everything is backed by pixel datawe dont do any approximation. [Photo: courtesy Muybridge] Finding the camera angle Tennis has been an effective launchpad for the companys technology. When we lowered [the cameras] all the way down to the lowest ad boards, social media just exploded, says Espeland. Muybridge systems were deployed last year at the Miami Open, the Madrid Open, and the U.S. Open. The company has an exclusive partnership with Sony, through its live sports subsidiary Hawk-Eye Innovations, to power all of the ATP Masters tournaments in 2026 (which kick off March 4 with the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California). I guess I can say that we will be seen in nearly every tennis tournament [this] year. Now the company is targeting additional sports. The key is finding unique perspectives where the technologys value proposition becomes obvious, providing a vantage point that makes the sport better when you watch it at home than in the arena. For soccerMuybridge recently ran a test that went live on air with Sky Sports in Germanythat could mean behind the goal and even in the goalposts. For Nascar or Formula 1, producers might actually ring the entire track with sensors (though early discussions have focused on capturing critical turns and pit stops). For baseball, viewers could look out on the field from the dugout. For hockeyMuybridge is currently working with the NHL and Fox Sportscameras could be set in the dasher boards, along the ad boards, or up in the concourse to create a virtual drone that appears to zoom around the rink from above. Crucially, theres no speed limitation with Muybridge, Espeland says. You can instantly move to wherever you want, and we’re creating all of the millions of pictures in between, just like our eyes do. [Photo: courtesy Muybridge] Muybridge inside Sports, for Muybridge, could just be the start. The company is currently involved in a pilot program that installs its cameras on the ceiling and walls of ambulances, allowing a remote ER doctor with a VR headset to virtually move around a patient to evaluate them. Security and surveillance represent additional avenues for potential VR expansion, as does an IRL version of the metaverse. “VR headsets never really took off because we always have to visit this virtual world, Espeland says. We jump into a room, you’re an avatar, I’m an avatar, but we want to interact with real people. News broadcasting and other live studio productions are another developing use case. The CBS Morning Show ran a test of Muybridges technology on its New York set in December 2025. Moving forward, says Espeland, he has an Intel inside philosophy: We have the core technology, and we look for partners who can represent the next strategic product and bring it into the market.
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