[I need to state from the outset that the NBC coverage will be geocoded so only lucky people in the USA will be able to watch it – at least that’s what I’m assuming. Don’t expect to see such an innovative app in the UK…]
Despite a conspicuous lack of snow for some of the events in Vancouver, the spectacle of the Winter Olympics (or Vancouver 2010) is just around the corner (opening ceremony is this Friday). After the outstanding success of the online coverage of the Beijing games, NBC have again teamed with Microsoft to deliver their online experience for the Winter games via Silverlight and Smooth Streaming. This means hundreds of hours of live coverage in HD quality, thousands of hours of on-demand footage, commentary, pause, rewind, contextual information etc etc. The Beijing NBC application was superb. Expect Vancouver to be even better.
Essentially the combination of IIS + Silverlight offers highest quality, minimum cost and maximum control.
Quality: Smooth Streaming is an adaptive streaming technology which dynamically varies the bitrate (and quality) of the stream depending on the network bandwidth and local conditions on the users machine. This way we can ensure the best possible quality is delivered at any point in time. If conditions deteriorate, lower bitrate “chunks” are delivered. The higher bitrate resumes as soon as things improve.
Cost: IIS also offers bit rate throttling (reducing bandwidth costs and limiting the amount of “wasted” footage delivered). Much of the video footage requested is never watched to the end but the server(s) will typically try and deliver the content as fast as the pipe will allow upon receiving the request. Bit rate throttling allow you to control the rate at which media is delivered thus making a huge saving on bandwidth costs where users aren’t watching footage to the end.
Control: Web playlists ensure that content providers retain control over the sequencing of content. This allows for the insertion of in-stream ads and the easy assembly of combination sequences for viewers (eg round-up of today, round-up of luge, round-up of gold medal performances etc)
Watch the MIX09 keynote where Scott Guthrie announces the latest IIS Media Enhancements (skip to 70m 25s).
And best of all, the end-results are cross-browser, cross-platform (see information here and click “System Requirements”) while on the server the only requirement is IIS7 as the web server. That means you’re invited to the media-fest whether you’re building in ASP.NET, PHP, RoR, CF, ASP, HTML.
You can find our more about IIS, Silverlight and Smooth Streaming (and even watch Smooth Streaming in action).
To get a better idea what’s involved in covering such a spectacle, take a look at this CNET News article from 2008.
[Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/andy_van_green/ / CC BY 2.0]
