Streaming the 2008 Beijing Olympics

"There is something magical about amateur athletics," says Miller. "Our online strategy is the same as on the broadcast … which is to ensure that [advertising] doesn’t intrude on the user experience to the extent that it diminishes what we’re trying to celebrate. … We’re obligated on behalf of our users to make sure they have a great experience, and our advertisers expect that."

With the flow of online video ad dollars set to grow from a trickle to a flood, companies in the online video ad space are competing to facilitate and reap the benefits of the long-promised monetization of online video. Microsoft will use the Olympics as an opportunity to showcase Silverlight’s support for third-party ad servers such as Atlas and DoubleClick, and it will also demonstrate two features on its 2008 web server that promise to raise the bottom line. "Web playlists" enable publishers to securely sequence content and advertising, preventing end users from skipping online video ads, and with "bit-rate throttling," the server meters how fast content is sent to the client and stops delivering if the end user clicks away. This allows publishers to save on bandwidth costs by serving only the 500KB watched by the user rather than the entire 5MB video file.

Both web playlists—formerly called "server-side playlists"—and bit rate throttling were previously available only on the Windows media server. Their availability on the Windows web server is indicative of Microsoft’s long-term strategy to transfer functionality from the media server to the web server.

"We’re essentially bringing more intelligence to progressive downloads," says Sklepowich. "Ultimately, we’re going to bring streaming-like capabilities to web servers."

Moving Overseas
The U.S. isn’t the only country competing in the Olympics, and NBCU isn’t the only entity broadcasting or streaming the games. Mexico City-based Televisa, the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world, is working with Move Networks to stream the Olympics to Spanish-speaking audiences. Move’s streaming technology breaks video down into small, 1 to 2-second files called "streamlets." Using "adaptive streaming" on the client side, the player analyzes available bandwidth and processing power on the client machine, then reassembles the streamlets to maximize the quality of the downloaded stream. Move promises faster start times, smoother playback without buffering, and high-quality video resolution. (Its technology powers much of the streaming at ABC.com.)

At MIX08, Microsoft announced that the Move plug-in would be bundled with Silverlight 2, so instead of downloading the 200KB Move plug-in, sports fans south of the border can download Silverlight if they want to stream the Olympics. (NBCU’s Telemundo network will stream the Olympics to Spanish-speaking audiences within the U.S.)

Game Time Decisions
As of press time, NBCOlympics.com had yet to make a number of important technical decisions. 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, but again, bitrates and other encoding parameters are still up in the air. The NBCOlympics.com player is also still being tweaked, with input from all parties.

"There’s a room here at Schematic in our NY offices," says Rechs. "When I walk past it, sometimes I see Schematic people in there, sometimes I see Microsoft people, and sometimes I see NBC people."

Streaming’s Niche
The shift from virtually no live streaming of previous Olympics to hundreds of hours of live streaming from Beijing may be dramatic, but online coverage is not intended to replace the television broadcast—at least not this year. Millions of people will still convene in living rooms across the country to watch the gymnastics finals on TV, and advertisers will still pay millions of dollars to reach that audience. (The IOC shifted the gymnastics and swimming finals to the morning in China so they can be shown live in prime time in the U.S.)