Live Smooth Streaming infrastructure and advertising for the 2010 Olympics
Microsoft and its partners provided an infrastructure that helped to provide NBC, the Canadian television company (CTV), and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) with streaming content of the 2010 Winter Olympics. A new article titled NBC Online Video Monetization and Highlights Creation for the 2010 Winter Olympics describes the general IT architecture and tools used to support these three broadcasters, and offers specific details about how NBC inserted midstream ads in both the live video and video-on-demand (VOD) scenarios and created and delivered highlight clips.
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The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver marked the sixth of seven consecutive Olympic Games broadcast by NBC Universal and presented the opportunity to build on the success of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. NBC teamed with premier technology vendors, led by Microsoft, to cover 4,485 hours of 2010 Winter Olympics events in HD via Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) Smooth Streaming to a video player based on Microsoft Silverlight. In addition to pleasing sports fans, the programming offered an audience of more than 15.8 million unique visitors to the many advertising partners of NBC. The exceptional capability of IIS Smooth Streaming and Silverlight technologies gave technology vendors the tools they needed to deliver midstream ads while providing an engaging experience for Olympics enthusiasts.
2010 Olympic Winter Games Fast Facts |
CTV | NRK | NBC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total number of events covered | 300, including 86 medal events |
300, including 86 medal events |
300, including 86 medal events |
| Hours of video consumed | 7.2 million hours total (6.3 live, 0.9 VOD) |
1.02 million hours | 4.4 million |
| Peak concurrent active live streams | 14 (out of 19) | 16 (out of 19) | 19 (out of 24) |
| Peak concurrent online viewers | 133,785 | 48,802 | 181,000 |
| Total amount of video delivered | 6.2 petabytes | 960 terabytes total (800 live, 160 VOD) |
3.6 petabytes |
| Total video streams delivered | 28.6 million | 4.6 million total (3.3 live, 1.3 VOD) |
50.5 million |
| Total number of unique visitors consuming video online | 3.9 million | 1.22 million | 15.8 million |
| Average minutes per unique view over the entire Games | 111.3 | - | - |
| Peak minutes per unique view (per user/per day) | - | 77.94 | - |
| Photos | - | - | 41,560 |
| Photo galleries | - | - | 1,573 |
| Video quality | 720p for live and VOD | 720p for live and VOD | 720p for live and VOD |