2008 Beijing Olympics as a Media Test-Bed 134
CNN is reporting that NBC is using the 2008 Olympics in Beijing as a test-bed to understand how people are using different media platforms. "NBC has scheduled 3,600 hours of Olympics programming on its main network, along with Telemundo, USA, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC and Bravo. That's the equivalent of eight days of programming packed into each day. In addition, the company is planning to make 2,200 hours of streaming video available on NBCOlympics.com. Consumers may also get video on demand via their computer and Olympics content through their mobile phones."
Re:will they actually cover the sports this time? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Olymp-whats? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:will they actually cover the sports this time? (Score:2, Interesting)
I've basically given up watching the broadcasts for exactly that reason. You only get 3 or 4 minutes of actual competition followed by a 15 minute sob story about some athlete having to deal with the deaths of her mother/father/sibling/uncle/pet goat after which they cut back to the studio where the talking head says where they'll be going to some time later but first these 10 minutes of commercials. And good luck getting any time for sports where the Americans are out of competition. Its simply not worth the frustrations anymore.
Re:Silverlight (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft Silverlight Gets a High Profile Win: 2008 Beijing Olympics [techcrunch.com].
NBC got incentivized. After Microsoft failed to gain control of Yahoo to use it as a channel to force Silverlight dominance, the NBC agreement was the fallback.
Re:BBC streamed last olympics online, didn't they? (Score:4, Interesting)
And the reason people were going to the BBC for online content was.... NBC's coverage sucks.
NBC insists on covering the Olympics "live", in prime time. Problem is - the Olympics are being held in a different time zone. So NBC tapes the events, blocks any "live" coverage that it can, and then presents the taped event in EST prime time as if was live. (That's why so many of the events on TV have *surprise* American winners - they just discard the tapes from events where the Americans lose badly).
Hopefully, if NBC is streaming content, they'll stream really live content from all sports. If not... then broadcasters that do a decent job in other countries will see a large uptick in their traffic.
Re:The Olymp-whats? (Score:2, Interesting)
Lies, damned lies and TV viewing statistics: The most watched televised sports events of 2006
Sport/Event/Claim/Verifiable
Football, Italy v France World Cup final, 715.1m/260m
American football, Super Bowl Steelers v Seahawks, 750m-1bn/98m
Winter Olympics, Torino 2006 opening ceremony, 2bn/87m
Football, Champs League Arsenal v Barça, 120m/86m
Formula One, Brazilian Grand Prix, 354m/83m
NASCAR, Daytona 500, n/a/20m
Baseball, World Series game five, n/a/19m
Golf, US Masters (final day), n/a/17m
Tennis, Wimbledon men's singles final, n/a/17m
Basketball, NBA finals game six, up to 1bn/17m
Cycling, Tour de France (final stage), n/a/15m
Golf, US Open (final day), n/a/10m
Golf, Ryder Cup (final day), up to 1bn/6m
Commonwealth Games, Melbourne opening ceremony, 1.5bn/5m
Cricket, ICC Champions Trophy final, n/a/3m
Re:The Olymp-whats? (Score:1, Interesting)
From the article:
In that case, all the Linux and Mac users being blocked by Microsoft's dodgy deal with NBC [techcrunch.com] should head over to http://www.nbcolympics.com/ [nbcolympics.com] and make sure they know the decision to block us was a bad one. Bonus points for leaving the site, and never returning, when you hit a lame 'platform not supported' message (I hit one in the Video section).
Re:The Olymp-whats? (Score:2, Interesting)
The Olympics are when distance events aren't just excuses to give sprinters rest
NOTE: above is said with humor and respect.
I can't watch that long ass swim event, though (like 25 laps?)... and am glad when they cut away, but that's only because I don't understand the sport. So I guess I see why they do it to track/swimming... It isn't fair to people who really enjoy the sport, but it may keep more of a diverse crowd watching.
PS: GO MAINE CHICK IN THE STEEPLE!
Re:Quality of the video streaming (Score:3, Interesting)
HD feeds wouldn't work out so well, as most people don't have the bandwidth. Bittorrent wouldn't be good for NBC, because think about what happens when the masses start learning how to use bittorrent. You know someone will edit out the commercials and create new torrents that will quickly become more popular than NBC's torrents.
However, it's not hopeless. I think they should create a proprietary, cross-platform P2P based Olympics viewer. A user could simply rank the events they were most interested in, and allow the program to download videos in the background. The program could then play these events back with a small number of ads included. The video ads should be brief, and supplemented by text ads on the user interface or below the video.
Most people don't care much about seeing the events live, so long as they don't know the outcome. Most events won't be taking place at the time people want to watch anyway.
There would be no need to encrypt the video. Let the determined few create torrents of the files, but the general public will accept a couple of ads in exchange for the convenience of using NBC's application, if it is well designed. Many people will also prefer the legal option, so long as NBC doesn't get greedy. Don't show 20 minutes of ads per hour like television, instead show 30 seconds every ten minutes. Otherwise you can't compete with bittorrent.
The Olympics is a global event, so the cost of recording the events should be shared among the various countries. Each country can then simply place their own commentators and graphics over the video feed. This will keep costs in check. (If they're really clever, they'll share the cost of developing the viewer application too.)
With globally shared video costs and P2P replacing broadcast costs, the expenses could be brought down so that the reduced number of ads still make a nice profit for NBC.
It may never happen, but one can dream...
Re:Not just Silverlight only (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, really? [nwsource.com]
The Seattle PI reports: "However, there's a catch- this generous helping of everything from taekwondo to equestrian is exclusively available to Windows Vista users."
Now read my post again. Is some part of it not in agreement with the facts?
I think you're deliberately misunderstanding me in order to muddy the issue.
The NBC "Olympics On The Go" service will only be broadcast to users of Windows Vista [arstechnica.com]. You can have the Olympics in "up to HD" but only if you take Vista too. I can only presume they are afraid their servers couldn't handle the load of allowing it to the broad audience of popular operating systems and handheld devices, even though users of that equipment are a much bigger market for their advertisers.
Re:The Olympics are Vista and Silverlight only (Score:4, Interesting)
Since September 2007, we've had Silverlight 1.0, Silverlight 1.1, Silverlight 2 Beta 1, and two weeks back, Silverlight 2 Beta 2. None of the versions are backwards-compatible, in fact, between 1.0 and 1.1, the computing model had completely changed. code developed for one version isn't operable in others.
Second of all, this is the standard MS release cycle. They do an alpha or CTP. Then they do one or two betas. Then they do one or two RC's, and finally RTM.
The Olympics start on 8-8-08. Today's date is 8-7-08. We're at Ver 2 Beta 2 now. By your words, they need to do an alpha, at least one RC and then release NBCOlympics.com in production. All this in a month.
Gosh, Firefox 3 went through what, 6 RC's in one month. YEAH! DESPERATION!!!!! I SPITE AT THEE MICROSOFT, FROM MY MOTHERS BASEMENT!
I work with Silverlight on a daily basis; you can see some of the work my team did on the Silverlight showcase site (won't point to the exact entry). None of the work, though, was developed on Firefox, nor did we do any of it in my mom's basement.
Trust me when I say this, MS has been _extremely_ aggressive in rolling out new features and versions in Silverlight. We think the only reason they're so aggressive is because of the Olympics; this is a hard production deadline they can't afford to miss. That is why we have versions every month. Hence my supposition of there being panic in Redmond.