Positive Energy

More details about NBC’s online Olympics coverage

CNet offered several articles talking about Olympics coverage today:

• An overview of the processes & systems being used for live online coverage
• Notes on internet & journalism restrictions being imposed by the Chinese government
• An overview of NBC’s online coverage plans
• A few image previews

My top takeaways:

• The “control room” portion of NBC’s specialized video player (based on Silverlight) will allow me to watch up to four video feeds at once.  Fantastic, for an Olympics junkie like me.
• NBC was trying to figure out how to insert full video ads into the stream, but couldn’t get the tech to work.  Instead, they’re putting display ads (I presume that this means relatively static, banner-like ads) into the feed, “especially during dead times in the action”.  Sounds fine and appropriate (pending execution, of course), and if it helps lead to more coverage in the future, I’m all for it.
• The “live” feeds are, in fact, not quite live.  NBC is adding a one-minute delay to allow “its cadre of live bloggers… to write their text and have the video and commentary synchronized.”  Interesting; I wasn’t aware they were incorporating this element.  I have some skepticism but will wait to see it before making a judgment.
• The CSO of Limelight (which is delivering the content to ISPs) says “I would not be surprised at all to get 1 million viewers.”  I hope he’s referring to 1M concurrent viewers, because if they’re preparing for only 1M UVs over the course of the Games, I’d predict they’re going to be off by more than an order of magnitude.

Finally, a little diagram showing the overall process: