Entries tagged with olympics - Channel 10

Final Olympics numbers

benwaggoner — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 01:49:00 GMT

People kept asking me about this on my just completed tour of Asia, so here’s a blog post that’s got the final numbers for the NBCOlympics.com video delivery with Silverlight.

The data is from the Silverlight 2 Customer Evidence and Quote Sheet.

During the 17 days of the games, the site had

51.9 million unique visitors (106% more than Athens and Torino combined)
1.3 billion page views
75.5 million video streams initiated (601% more than Athens and Torino combined)
9.9 million hours of video watched (equivalent of 1,126 years of video).
More than 27 minutes per user average viewing time (compared to 3 minutes for sites using other streaming video technologies)

And these great quotes from Perkins Miller, Senior Vice President, Digital Media, NBC Sports and Olympics:

“NBC had plans to create the most ambitious online video event in history — more than 2,200 hours of Olympic coverage in 25 sports in less than 17 days – with 3,500 hours on demand. NBC needed to ensure the experience was versatile, stable, and — above all — engaging and entertaining.”

NBC Sports chose Silverlight 2 because “with such a vast number of events and hours of live and on-demand video, we needed a scalable, flexible platform that would deliver an immersive and engaging experience.”

Beyond the NBC in the USA, Silverlight was used for Olympics coverage in other countries, including:

France (FranceTV)
Netherlands (NOS)
Russia (Sportbox.ru)
Italy (RAI)

Silverlight was a great coming-of-age story for Silverlight as we prepared to launch Silverlight 2. The“does Silverlight scale” and “will customers install it” questions have largely gone away in the last couple of months.

Play The Olympics With Popfly

sarahintampa — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:26:00 GMT

The Popfly team has put together a handful of Olympic-themed games in honor of the Summer Games occurring now in Beijing. There are ten games in all included archery, boxing, diving, gymnastics, long jump, soccer, synchronized swimming, track & field, weightlifting, and even torch lighting! Well, that last one isn’t really a sport, but you get the idea. The games, like most of the gaming content built with Popfly, are for the casual gamer who’s looking to kill some time or just relax and take a break by playing a lightweight, easy, and fun game. Next to each of the games listed, there is a link to customize the game, so if you want to tweak it to make it your own, you have that option, too. You can play all the games from popfly.com/sports.

Alex Zambelli's blog is reborn with Olympics info roundup

benwaggoner — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 19:55:00 GMT

Yikes! No posts since early July. I've been a bad, bad blogger. Fortunately, compression wizard Alex Zambelli's blog has relaunched to take up the slack!

He's started off with a series of Olympics posts.

NBC Olympics 24/7 - a great roundup of information and details

NBC Olympics video without Silverlight? - showing how to play back the Olympics without Silverlight on Windows (and why you'd want to use the Silverlight version if given a choice).

Why no full screen mode in the NBC Olympics player?, citing this silverlight.net forum discussion including information from our own Tom Taylor.

Hopefully he'll inspire me to get back at it...

Olympic Fever: Search, Widgets, and More

sarahintampa — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:38:00 GMT

With the 2008 Beijing Olympics now underway, a lot of people are infected with Olympic Fever. There seems to be million ways to watch the Olympics this year and keep up with the news. We’ve highlighted some of these ways already, including the Silverlight-powered NBCOlympics website, Olympics on your mobile phone, the MSN toolbar's Olympics tab, Olympics on the Go for Media Center, and even an Olympics Medal Count Vista Gadget. But that’s still not all the ways you can keep up with the games, so how about a few more?

On the Neowin website, they’ve broken down all the ways in which Live Search is delivering Olympics coverage as well as offering other Olympics-related features. This includes the following:

Olympics 2008 news scope, available in Live Search News at http://news.live.com gives readers up-to-date coverage with additional elements such as Olympics 2008 news images.
Olympian xRank, available at http://xrank.live.com gives fans a way to track the popularity of their favorite athletes.
Olympics Videos are available at http://video.live.com when customers search “Olympics.”
The Live.com Homepage will rotate Olympics images in the background for the duration of the games.
Athlete Instant Answer will feature profiles of Olympians as searchers type in the first and last names of the athlete in search queries. For instance, fans can search “Shawn Johnson” or “LeBron James.”
Medal Count Instant Answer will provide an “all up” medal count by country, sport, or by country and sport when searchers type in Olympics-related keywords in search queries. For instance, fans can search terms like “swimming” or “China gymnastics.”

Get The Olympics On Your Mobile Phone

sarahintampa — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:43:00 GMT

Thanks to a partnership between Lenovo, Intel, and Zumobi, Windows Mobile users now have access to an app called the “Olympic Zoom Space,” which is available via a free download at http://lenovo.zumobi.com. This four-tile zoom space, like other Zumobi downloads, lets you quickly and easily view news and photos from the web without need of your web browser. The app features news, blogs, photos, and other updates from Lenovo’s “Olympic Podium” website, a site which focuses on providing you with a comprehensive guide to the Summer Games in Beijing.

Olympics On The Go Has Arrived

sarahintampa — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 05:09:00 GMT

At the end of June, we told you that the Olympics were coming to Media Center. Well, now they’re here! If you haven’t already done so, you have to try out NBC Olympics On the Go on your Windows Media Center PC. This internet-driven TV service from NBC Universal is powered by TVTonic’s platform and brings you all the latest from the games in HD. Even if you don’t have a TV tuner for your Vista Home Premium or Ultimate PC, you’ll still have access to HDTV coverage from NBC, USA, and Universal TV networks for a total of 225 hours of coverage over 17 days. This includes 24 sports, the full opening ceremony, and a closing ceremony montage. What’s really cool about this service is that you can sign up to get automatic downloads of all the available coverage for any particular sport – this way, you’ll never have to miss any of your favorites. The content is downloaded and cached on your PC, so you can watch it whether you’re online or off. It even works through any Extender device! To get access to NBC Olympics On the Go, just launch Media Center launch and scroll down to the Online Media strip where you will find a link to NBC Olympics On The Go in the default view. (If, for some reason, you don't have the option, you can also download it from here.)

Watch the Olympics Live now at NBCOlympics.com

Tina — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 00:50:00 GMT

Who needs DVR when you can watch the 2008 Summer Olympics Live at NBCOlympics.com. With over 2200 hours of live Olympic footage and more feature and profile pieces than you know what to do with...it's the place to be this summer. Using Silverlight 2.0 you can watch up to four live events at one time. I recruited Ex-BMX racer Eric Schmidt to give us a walk-thru of this superb user experience.

Olympics Are Coming To Media Center

sarahintampa — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:16:00 GMT

The 2008 Beijing Olympics are nearly here and along with the Silverlight-powered NBCOlympics website, the Microsoft/NBC partnership will also bring us video from the Olympic Games right to our Media Center PCs. These videos will be made available as clips on Vista Media Center and organized into channels based on event (e.g. swimming, gymnastics, track & field, etc.) The service, called "Olympics On the Go," won't be offering live coverage, but will be providing "up-to-HD quality" automatic downloads with help from digital content provider, Wavexpress's TVTonic. Because the content is downloaded instead of streamed, the footage can be watched whether you're online or not. And since Media Center extenders like the Xbox 360 let you view content on other devices besides a PC, you can watch the Olympics events you want to see from any room in your home. Best of all, this service will be completely free!

Good article about the Olympics in Silverlight

benwaggoner — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:31:00 GMT

Max Bloom has written a good article about NBC Universal''s upcoming Olympics broadcasts in Silverlight.

Read the article yourself, but here's a few choice quotes from it:

"NBCU plans to offer 3,600 hours of live programming from Beijing. That’s 212 live hours for each of the 17 days of the Olympics... In addition to the sheer volume of live content to be delivered—three times what was offered in 2004— what’s notable is that most of NBCU’s live programming—2,200 hours—will be delivered online at NBCOlympics.com."
"The 2008 Summer Games in Beijing will mark the arrival of streaming as a viable alternative to the Olympics’ television broadcast. This summer, NBCOlympics.com will offer 4,400 hours of on-demand streaming in addition to its 2,200 hours of live programming, making the Beijing Olympics the most ambitious streaming media project in history."
"To help meet that challenge, the NBCOlympics.com player offers a “metadata overlay” feature, which allows the player to display transparent data and navigation tools over the video window. This enables users to access statistics and other data without covering up, pausing, or leaving the primary video display. For example, play-by-play announcers’ dialogue can be keyed into an XML data stream, then rendered as a timecoded, scrolling text caption that transparently overlays the bottom of the video display. The player also enables the TiVo-like experience of pausing, rewinding, and replaying content, and these two features together allow viewers to use either the timecode or the play-by-play captioning to rewind to a specific point in the on-screen action and replay it."
"A slew of DRC-Stream software and encoder boards from Canada-based Digital Rapids are being deployed in Beijing to populate NBCOlympics.com’s encoding farm, but other than committing to VC-1, NBCOlympics.com has yet to confirm encoding bitrates, frame rates, or frame sizes. (Without offering more specifics, Miller says NBCOlympics.com will be streaming through a managed bitrate solution to optimize the user’s connection, with a target maximum bitrate of 650KB/sec.) Digital Rapids is also supplying software to enable transcoding from other digital media formats into VC-1.Miller promises hundreds of hours of online HD video..."

Note that there's already a bunch of content up at NBCOlympics.com if you want to get an early taste of what's in store on 8/8/08.

"Silverlight to shine in NBC's Olympic's coverage" on News.com

benwaggoner — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:16:00 GMT

News.com has a nice article by Victoria Ho up today about how Silverlight is going to be used for NBC's Olympic's coverage. It's based on an interview with Johnathan D. Miller, NBC's Senior Vice President, Sports Programming.

Some bits indicating the scope of what we're working on here:

NBC intends to broadcast and archive 17 days of the Olympics on the site, resulting in 2,200 hours of video which users may watch live and call up on-demand for free.

Miller sees this as a complementary repository to what the broadcaster will air on TV. "We're talking about doing 25 sports online that we aren't really doing on broadcast. There will be significantly more content online than on air," said Miller, adding that he has observed strong demand from fans for on-demand content.

...
Since the prototype, the team has focused on tweaking the user experience of the player, including the navigation interface, MBR (managed bit rate)--which matches the quality of the video to the user's connection speed--and metadata tagging of video streams to make searching and archiving easier.
...

On NBC's choice of Silverlight as a platform over competitors, Miller noted NBC's existing partnership with Microsoft in MSNBC, but added that Microsoft is a "holistic partner", being able to offer its services as a "media and technology company, not just a technology partner".

NBC is also working with a Los Angeles-based digital media agency, Schematic, to develop the user interface. Schematic CTO Matthew Rechs told CIO magazine last month that some 25 people were working on the project at the agency.

It's great stuff, and certainly the biggest, coolest project I've ever been involved with (not that I'm doing that much of the heavy lifting personally at this point). It's amazing how far things have come since the 1998 World Cup when I was struggling to get 320x240 web video clips to look good enough for Nike's web site for the event while still offering decent buffering times on 56K modems.

How Big is the Olympics Web Site?

sarahintampa — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:11:00 GMT

BIG! An article on PC World begins, "How would you like to be handed this IT project: create a website that will present 2,200 hours of live, interactive video, plus integrated broadcast coverage. The site will have huge spikes of traffic, and operate under worldwide scrutiny, so it has to be designed for performance. It has to be done in the next 150 days; no schedule extensions are possible. And it must deliver a brilliant user experience."

The developers of the Summer Olympics website are extremely ambitious, wouldn't you say. That's going to be quite an accomplishment! So would you be surprised to find out that there are only 12 people writing code?

According to Matthew Rechs, CTO of Schematic, who worked with Microsoft and NBC on the site, 12 people (plus designers, managers, etc. - 25 in all) is enough. "That isn't a particularly big team, but they don't need to crank out millions of lines of code. The video site isn't an enterprise-class project with lots of business logic; it's all web services on the back end," he says.

The new site will use Silverlight technology to start, stop, rewind, pause, and replay videos of the events. A picture-in-picture feature, just like you would see on a real TV, will also be available.