Entries tagged with olympics - Channel 10

Olympic Photosynths

Sarah Perez — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:31:00 GMT

Over on the Photosynth blog, they’ve rounded up the top contributions from users who submitted Photosynth’d collections from the recent Winter Olympics. Over the past several weeks, there have been over 40 different synths from the games added to the online gallery, including contributions from the following synthers:

Rick, beatnavy, fjcwhistler, siblog, cgsguy2, Mooseboys, MidnightFrog, rieskame, erickoo, BDsynth,Onyxmoon63, singalittlesong, kriskrug, GaryGlanz, brad_dennis, bal, jessica.glago, neilbl, msnbc.com,jimcseke, Lit, aeolien

(Click through on any of their names to see their Photosynth submissions.)

The top synths – aka the “most viewed” – included those featuring the sports themselves like luge, skating, curling, and skiing in addition to synths from Vancouver and those from other major events like the torch lighting, for example.

You can see some of these favorite synths in the image below:

For more Olympic action, head to the Photosynth site and search for Olympics.

Track Olympic Tweets on NBCOlympics.com

Sarah Perez — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:15:00 GMT

On NBCOlympics.com, the official site for Winter Games coverage, there’s a Twitter application called the “Olympic Twitter Tracker.” I recently discovered this thanks to a tweet from Marshall Kirkpatrick, who said it was “pretty cool.” If he thinks so, then I definitely had to check it out. And indeed it is.

Unlike many Twitter trackers, this one doesn’t just stream the tweets in a big, unwieldy flow. It’s not just one window that aggregates everything tagged “Olympics.” Instead, the interface to the application uses images to display the various topics being tweeted about and sizes them proportionally to the number of tweets. Obviously, the sports and other keywords associated with the events occurring now will have larger sections and those past will be smaller. In addition, within each section, other popular keywords appear for even more granular filtering of the Twitter stream. So if you’re interested in snowboarding tweets but only those about “Shaun White,” for example, that’s an option.

When you click into any of these sections, the Twitter stream appears on the left with related keywords on the right. So if you click “Evan Lysacek” you’ll see keywords like “gold,” “men,” “skating,” “wins,” etc. (Yep, as you may have guessed, he won a gold medal.) The Tracker even has a bar at the top that counts down until its next automatic refresh – every minute. That’s better than a live stream since it gives you a chance to actually read what’s in front of you, but it’s still fast enough to keep you up-to-date in near real-time.

Also at the top is a link to “Olympic Tweets” for even more types of tweets. These are sorted by different categories like tweets from the athletes, tweets from the NBCOlympics.com Twitter account, tweets from the Olympics Health Twitter account, and “All.”

The entire Twitter app is part of the larger “Olympic Pulse” – the app that tracks the blogs, tweets, and other news from the Olympics. You can check out the entire Olympic Pulse here.

Bing Tracks the Most Popular Olympics Sports

Sarah Perez — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 13:12:00 GMT

Thanks to Bing’s popular “Instant Answer” feature, web searchers can quickly find out Olympic-related info like who won what event, what time figure skating is on, when a particular athlete is competing and more. Now it appears that the Bing Team has been tracking these Olympic search trends to come up with a measurement of what the most popular winter sports are and not surprisingly, snowboarding is #1. Not just because it’s fun to watch, I’d guess, but also because the U.S. has been crazy for the snowboarder champ Shaun White.

The next most popular search is hockey, followed by “skeleton” (maybe because people don’t know what that is? I didn’t – had to look it up on Bing myself), then figure skating, curling, luge, bobsled, speed skating, cross country skiing, biathlon, freestyle skiing, alpine skiing, ski jump, and then nordic combined. Of course these stats are influenced by what events are on when and which ones have come and gone. When all’s said and done and the Olympics are over, it would be interesting to revisit this data to see what ended up being the most popular throughout the course of the Winter Games.

But if perusing data isn’t really your thing, you can goof off instead. Take the Winter Games Quiz on Bing's Facebook page and you can test your knowledge of the games while also exploring some of Bing’s features.

5 Bing Map Apps for the Winter Olympics

Sarah Perez — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:14:00 GMT

The Microsoft Canada Development Centre recently ran a contest that challenged developers to create Bing Map applications for the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics, taking place in Vancouver, Canada. The resulting apps are designed for use by Vancouver citizens and visitors during the Olympics and use the open data from the City of Vancouver, the MS Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) and Windows Azure. After the contest is over, the source code for all the apps will be uploaded to Codeplex.

Here’s what the developers created:

MapWay - a way to find City of Vancouver facilities and Olympic events.
Free Finders – helps you find free events and services in Vancouver and uses a Facebook connection.
MoBuddy – enables you to hookup with friends and visitors during Olympics to plan and share experiences through mobile social networking including Facebook
eVanTivitY – enables you to find city and social events and lets you add-in user-defined data-feeds
Vancouver Parking – helps you plan and find the best parking spots when visiting Vancouver

You can see screenshots of all these apps over on the Bing blog here. (Pictured is the parking app, #5)

Bing and the Winter Olympics

Sarah Perez — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:04:00 GMT

Microsoft is again partnering with NBC Universal to deliver live Olympics coverage. On the NBCOlympics.com website, over 400 hours of live competition will be made available for all 15 of the Winter Olympics sports. In addition, you’ll have access to 1000 hours of full-event replays, recaps, montages, commentator analysis, and athlete-specific clips.

As with the previous Olympics games, the video will be streamed in HD via Microsoft Silverlight technology and will feature DVR-like controls for pausing and rewinding the live coverage.

Other new features include Silverlight Enhanced HD photo galleries on NBCOlympics.com where you can zoom in and out of your favorite images and a social “Olympic Pulse” page that will feature athlete and expert tweets and blog posts.

This year, however, Bing is getting in on the action too. You can visually explore Vancouver through Bing’s interactive StreetSide Maps, the Bing homepage will feature Olympic-related images, Bing Visual Search will add an “Olympic Athletes” category, and new Instant Answers will be added daily on popular athletes, sporting events and medal counts. In addition, Bing has exclusive rights to index all the Winter Games videos.

Although the games haven’t started yet, you can visit NBCOlympics.com for related news, images, and videos.

Live Smooth Streaming Beta, Inlet's encoder, and the 2010 Winter Olympics

Ben Waggoner — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:03:00 GMT

Live Smooth Streaming

Lots is going on at MIX, so as not to overwhelm with too many posts, I’ll try to triple-dip on this one.

First, as part of Scott Guthrie’s keynote yesterday (now with transcript), we announced that live streaming is coming for Smooth Streaming. The key advantages of Smooth Streaming are as applicable to live video as on-demand. And for high volume live events where scalability concerns can force users into “waiting rooms” or a lower tier of service, the offered scalability may be even more important yet. In particular, my personal take on the killer aspects of live streaming are:

Seamless adaptive bandwidth switching

With on-demand content, particular shorter duration, you can let users with slow connections buffer a while and then play. But live is live; if you’re offering just a 1000 Kbps stream, a user isn’t going to get a decent experience if the the bandwidth available to the player drops to 800 Kbps for more than a couple of seconds. And even someone with a 5 Mbps connection may see that shared between multiple users and computers, and may have multiple bandwidth-consuming apps running at the same time; it’s a lot to ask that the bandwidth NEVER drops below 1000 Kbps for the duration of a long event. Thus, the managed code heuristics module running inside the Silverlight client can continuously measure available CPU speed, bandwidth, and even window size, and then give the user the best content they can use at that moment. And it can seamlessly switch without any pause in the video or “buffering” message to a lower stream if needed or a higher stream if usable.

My hope is that this can break live streaming out of the lowest common denominators used to maximize availability. With Smooth Streaming we can offer fallback rates down to the minimum experience appropriate for the content, and as high a rate as the content justifies, with each user getting the best experience they can get at the moment. I hope this can make consumer HD streaming a reality for a lot of viewers.

SmoothHD.com is a great demo of the seamless stream switching for on-demand; the live experience will be essentially identical.

Leveraging scalability of the web via proxy caching

In Alex Zambelli’s formulation, Smooth Streaming “adapts video to the web, instead of trying to adapt the web to video.” The content is delivered in a series of small files each containing a few seconds of video and audio. And each copy of each chunk has the same URL, so proxy caches handle this automatically. So all the CDNs (like our launch partner Akamai) with great web delivery technology are able to immediately leverage their huge network of proxy edge servers with Smooth Streaming. Moreso, all the ISPs and organizations with proxy servers (and that’s most of them) can have multiple people watching the same content with only a single copy of each chunk having to be sent to the proxy. So those horror stories about a company’s internet connection being brought to its knees by everyone watching the Olympics or March Madness at the same time? We think we’ve done a lot to make that much less of a problem, since the more popular the content, the more scalability it gets through the proxy caching. Hopefully this can make the waiting room a thing of the past.

There’s plenty of additional tuning the CDNs and others can do to further improve caching for Smooth Streaming specifically, but it gets a huge boost automatically by leveraging the existing infrastructure of the web.

Live PVR

Since on-demand Smooth Streaming is delivered as a bunch of small chunks, and live Smooth Streaming is delivered as a bunch of small chunks, we’ve eliminated the hard line between a live broadcast and the on-demand version of it that used to need to be published several hours later. Instead, what’s live is just the latest chunk that’s available, but every chunk is still there (and likely still in the proxy cache). So that means you can pause, rewind, skip to the beginning, skip back to live, all during the live stream. Think of it as a PVR in the cloud.

And it’s already in beta

Better yet, we’ve already got a public beta of it for download! It requires IIS 7.0, running on either Windows Server 2008 or Vista SP1 (you can play with it without installing 2008).

It can be installed via our cool new Web Platform Installer as well as traditional .msi files.

The package also includes a "simulated live encoder" which loops out the bits from a local file to the server just like an encoder would do. This enables server and player development, testing, and configuration without having to actually run a live encoder 24/7.

We also have a new IIS Media Services portal with information about all the IIS media delivery technologies. There’s a nice overview about the platform as well.

Inlet’s Live Smooth Streaming encoder

As part of the announcement, Inlet also announced they’ll be the first to market with 3rd party Smooth Streaming encoding, support on-demand in Armada and (in a live demo!) Live in Spinnaker. We’ve got lots of Windows Media and Silverlight customers using Spinnakers with great satisfaction already, so adding Live Smooth is going to be a great upgrade.

Inlet’s John Bishop is presenting along with IIS’s John Bocharov at MIX as I type this in fact. There should be more details about their encoders, and the on-demand version of the session should be available by tomorrow. Here’s the details for finding it in the archives easier.

Delivering Media with Internet Information Services 7 (IIS) Media Services and Microsoft Silverlight MIX09-T56F

By: John Bishop, John Bocharov Tags: Media | Servers

See how to deliver media with the best user experience in a cost-effective, scalable, and highly manageable way. Learn how to expand your reach and improve quality using Smooth Streaming, how to save on bandwidth, and how to maintain control when using Progressive Download. Understand how IIS Media Services and WMS light up the media ecosystem from encoding to playback.

Others have noted we’re racing along at un-Microsoft speeds with Silverlight and Smooth Streaming. It’s only six months since we shipped Silverlight 2 and we’re already at Silverlight 3 beta. And Smooth Streaming wasn’t even announced then and we’ve already got on-demand and live servers in beta. But hey, this is the internet, and that’s how fast we have to go.

And of course this is only possible with the great foundations of technologies like Windows Media, .NET, IIS, and Windows. And at least as important, with the great partners like Inlet we’ve been working with for years. We’re all really excited about what’s possible here, and pushing to get it out there so people can use it quickly. We’ve known what video on the web could become for more than a decade now, and it feels like we’ve finally entered that last lap toward the finish line.

And a great event to be focusing on would be…

Live Smooth Streaming for the 2010 Winter Olympics

It seems like I’m only just now catching up on my sleep from the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, but the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver are less than 11 months away (staring.

And yesterday, as part of Scott’s keynote, Perkins Miller (senior vice president, Digital Media, for NBC Universal Sports and Olympics) announced we’ll be doing Vancouver with Silverlight and Smooth Streaming. And building on the Bejing experience with 720p HD and much deeper interactivity and information. His whole comments are great, including some interesting numbers about Beijing viewership and NBCU’s vision for the 2010 experience . I’ll just close out this already long post quoting his section from the transcript:

PERKINS MILLER: Thank you, Scott.

Hello, everybody! I was here about one year ago at this time, in fact, as we were preparing for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. How many people here watched some of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, those phenomenal athletes? (Applause.) I mean, it was just incredible. I mean, it was the single largest viewed audience that we had on television in history. It was also the single largest digital event in history. And we did that in partnership with Scott's team here, with the Silverlight group.

It was phenomenal. We did more than 50 million unique visitors, more than 1.3 billion page views. We streamed more than 70 million clips in the 17-day period of time. We served up 10 million hours of video.

And critically we served up 5,000 individual clips for consumers each and every day of the second week of the Olympics.

And what that really showed us is that the long tail really works. People in their desk, in their houses wanted to go watch rowing, wanted to go watch beach volleyball, wanted to watch all these sports at their time, at their leisure, and we enabled them to do it. It was an absolutely phenomenal partnership.

It really worked out well for us on the commercial side supporting all our interests. We were able to show for people who went to NBCOlympics.com and watched video and consumed content there, when they went back to watching their television, they watched twice as much television. Think about that, twice as much television for people who went and used a digital platform. It really brought to life the fact that we need to deliver as a media company a full 360-degree experience to our customers.

In addition, the people who watched video online during the time, if they were in the office or at their house, those folks who went and used the enhanced experience – you're seeing some of the examples here on the screen – these people who watched the enhanced experience like picture-in-picture, being able to watch four live feeds simultaneously, they watched three times as much video as those people who just chose to watch a single stream or a less enhanced experience.

What that told us is if we deliver a higher-quality experience, if we deliver something that's going to engage the audience, they will watch more. They will be more engaged by our product, and they will ultimately serve as a better audience to our product. So, it was really a tremendous experience.

Now, who knows, how many people can tell me where the next Olympics are? Anybody? OK, I didn't hear anything. Oh, come on, Vancouver, 2010. It's the winter Olympics. It was kind of a trick question; there are summer and winter games. So, the next Olympics are in Vancouver, Canada. They're roughly a year from now.

And I'm here to announce for the first time a renewal of our partnership with Silverlight. They will be providing the enhanced online video coverage for NBC's coverage of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, Canada. (Cheers, applause.)

And I am truly honored to be out here today because Scott's team has just done a phenomenal job coming up with what we think is going to be the ultimate product for a video event online. We're going to be streaming the Olympics fully in HD. This is going to be an adaptive, Smooth Streaming event, full 720p.

So, when you walk out of your house in the morning, and you go to your office, and you've left your beautiful 52-inch HD television at home, and you sit down at your desk and you want to grab some video from the Olympics that day, it's going to mirror that experience. We're going to be able to deliver you that continuous, high quality experience that you expect now as a consumer.

In addition, we're going to be able to bring you the DVR experience that you expect. So, just as Scott was illustrating earlier, you'll be able to pause the live stream, you'll be able to rewind the live stream, you'll even be able to go slow motion. So, for those of you who have been following the World Cup skiing this winter, there's a woman by the name of Lindsey Vonn who absolutely lit the world on fire. She won the World Cup overall. She is skiing phenomenally well. And if you want to see her fly off a 150-foot jump in the Vancouver Olympics – 50 meters for those from Canada – you'll be able to watch here in slow-mo online land those jumps and go through to the finish line.

We'll also be able to deliver to you full metadata overlays. What this means is that we'll be able to take the live results, the athlete biographies, the country information, all the information that gives you the kind of context for when the Olympics is, and deliver it to you as part of the enhanced Olympics experience. So, if you don't know who Lindsey Vonn is, you'll be able to find out who she is.

In addition, we've found that when you're watching the Olympics, and when you're trying to be engaged in this event, it's all-consuming. People want to know what's happening, when it's happening, and they want to consume the content where they are, whenever they are. This means that live video alerts are going to be critical. And for these games we'll deliver you not only live video alerts, we'll be able to give you real time feeds of those alerts. So, if you signed up to get the most popular clip of that moment, we'll deliver that to you. And again it will come through, depending on your platform, as a full HD experience.

Finally, because we need to commercialize this, for those of you that know the sports business, we do need to find ways to bring our partners to the table. We have the ability this time to do live ad insertion with our live streams. This functionality is going to be critical to give you as a consumer a fairly seamless experience, still be able to enjoy the live event, but allow our commercial partners access in order to find a way to associate with this great event that we'll be putting on together.

So, I can't tell you how excited I am. I'm thrilled to be here, I'm thrilled to be working with Scott's team. We have 331 days to go to the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, and I hope you all watch, and thanks very much. (Applause.)

In closing, I’d like to add my own (Applause) as well. Great stuff.

Although it’s only 329 days now. Back to work…

Final Olympics numbers

Ben Waggoner — 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

Sarah Perez — 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

Ben Waggoner — 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

Sarah Perez — 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

Sarah Perez — 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

Sarah Perez — 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 Wood — 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

Sarah Perez — 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

Ben Waggoner — 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

Ben Waggoner — 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?

Sarah Perez — 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.