Did NBC Medal at Online Olympics Coverage?
While NBC got strong reviews for its online video coverage of the summer Olympics in Beijing, reaction to its Vancouver online video has been much more mixed. While traffic was impressive during the run of the games, many people complained that they were blocked from watching the video at all.
Behind the scenes, production seems to have run more smoothly this time around. It was a more mature platform, says Eric Schmidt, Microsoft's senior director of media and advertising evangelism, and it used a complete end-to-end Silverlight system, with no Windows Media Services. Pulling off Beijing took a lot of resources, but 18 months later the Silverlight ecosystem has matured.
"I would say we had near flawless delivery," says Schmidt.
That growth enabled the Microsoft team to help NBC out with its feature wish list, including creating a core infrastructure that multiple broadcasters, including ones in Canada and Norway, could work off of and share.
"We've laid the groundwork for other large scale events. If you make the right investments and build the right architecture up front, you can build a system that can serve multiple business requirements," says Schmidt.
Schmidt's team also created a mechanism that let NBC and other broadcasters create highlight clips in real time from live, long-form content. Viewers joining in events late were able to use those highlight clips to get up to speed quickly. The real-time mechanism also allowed for greater monetization, as editors could drop advertisements into live streams.
During the games' peak, Microsoft was streaming 24 live events, with 9 to 11 streams going out for each.
Schmidt's team made more conservative choices this time around in how long it took viewers on high-bandwidth connections to reach the highest bit rate stream. Silverlight's adaptive streaming lets viewers see the highest bit rate stream that their connection can handle. While viewers could quickly reach the highest rate stream during Beijing, that wasn't the case here.
"Going into the Olympics, we knew we were hedging on the conservative side," says Schmidt.
The reason was that some people were ramped up too quickly during the Beijing coverage, leading to buffering issues. This time Microsoft decided to go slower, to make sure that the host computer could handle the stream.
Problems also arose from restrictions that NBC put in place to limit the online video to paying cable, satellite, and IPTV customers. Most subscribers got past the authentication system just fine, but a large handful were wrongly refused. And non-subscribers couldn't reach the video at all.
We reached Adam Freifeld, NBC Sports and Olympic's senior director of communications, who asked for written questions, but then said simply, "We appreciate your interest in the story but we are going to take a pass on this one." It looks like NBC would prefer that memories of its authentication system fade away.
Schmidt defended the system, however, explaining that the Beijing coverage also had an authentication system, but it wasn't as stringent. There, viewers simply chose their TV provider from a drop-down list. There was no authentication. This time around, NBC had to enforce rules to satisfy the contractual demands of pay-TV services who didn't want to cannibalize customers.
NBC embargoed some popular sports from appearing online, which Schmidt also defended. "At the end of the day, they're doing that for business reasons," he says. He also notes that there are fewer sports in winter games than summer games, so while similar restrictions were put in place during the Beijing games, they felt more noticeable here.
Schmidt's team is already gearing up for its next major streaming event, March Madness. During the first four days, viewers will be able to watch any of four simultaneous basketball games, switching between them at will.
"It's the perfect TV companion," says Schmidt.
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