Behind Silverlight at the Olympics!

Well it's been two days and NBC and MSN are working hard to keep the Olympic coverage coming . I thought I would provide some detail on behind the scenes on what is going on with the event. So far it's reported that NBC had the highest day of coverage on the 10th and it saw about 3.42 million video streams with 66.7 million page views and an average time spent on the site of 15 minutes. I won't confirm these stats, nor would I want too as it's NBC's data and it's up to them to publish their numbers. It's also been reported that Nielsen-Netratings shows NBCOlympics.com traffic is on the rise, climbing from 2,664,000 uniques on Friday to 4,008,000 on Saturday. Again, I won't confirm this either (you should ask NBC :).

Another interesting report from the Wall Street Journal stated that NBCU says the early indications are that its online viewing is reinforcing television, not cannibalizing it as was previously feared. This is another learning experience that validates content companies who value their content can maintain their viewership on TV by extending thier business' to the web.

Inside the process

The video player for the Olympics site is built using Silverlight 2 Beta2 and the Olympics Silverlight application itself is written using managed code and on top of the .NET Framework subset included with Silverlight (all UI in the application is built using the WPF based framework).

The video is streamed out live over the web in two bitrates, 350kbits and 650kbits using Windows Media Services. We have the capacity to handle 600,000 concurrent users and have two content delivery network providers hosting the site throughout the Olympics.

Some background on what NBC is doing. NBC has HD cameras in Beijing that will capture each event feed from multiple cameras and angles. Those feeds are brought back to teams of people in control rooms and producers in Beijing that will do real-time shot selection at the event. The video is then encoded in real-time and sent to NBC HQ in NY. Commentary and the play by play meta data are then included in real-time by dozens of analysts who have taken over the SNL Studio at Studio 8H.

All live events will be stored for on-demand playback, and NBC will publish each event shortly (within mins) after the events are finalized. They are also preserving all the meta data for on-demand playback so users can get the entire experience long after the event is over. Click here to see an example of one from a soccer game earlier this week.

NBC will also produce hundreds of videos for the highlight section and provide highlight content and summaries of the games. These are done by editors and producers in both Beijing and New York, and will show up several times every hour throughout the Olympics.

It's quite a coordination and amazing that all this can be brought real-time from around the world. Hope you enjoy all the hard work put into bringing people all the content, as many people have worked (and are still working) hard to bring them to you.

C