Streaming Video – the gold medal technology winner of NBC’s Olympic coverage

(Photo credit: Mashable)

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a Summer Olympics junkie. While I favor swimming, gymnastics and diving, I’ve been known to watch coverage of sports as obscure as team handball or trampoline simply because they are Olympic.

Now that the Beijing Games have come to an end, I’m forced to re-entered the real world. This morning, I changed my Firefox default home page back to my Google reader…for the past fourteen days, the default was www.nbcolympics.com. I was pleasantly satisfied with NBC’s coverage of the Games this year, especially since Beijing’s 12-hour time difference allowed for live prime time coverage of Michael Phelps and Nastia Luikin. For the evenings I simply couldn’t stay awake any longer, I relied on my Charter Communications DVR system, which I’m sorry to report did not take away any medals from my technology assessment podium. On countless occasions, the DVR ended the given recorded segment just seconds into the medal ceremony (by all accounts, my favorite part) because it aired at 12:01. I’d like to ask that the technology become a bit smarter and realize when taping should actually conclude.



However, the gold medal technology winner in my book is by far NBC’s streaming video of event coverage, medal ceremonies and athlete profiles. The HD quality only required a simple Silverlight 2.0 plug in, and I could catch highlights of anything I missed (like the conclusion of the beach volleyball tournament) or mishaps I wanted to review (such as the USA track team’s failed baton pass.)

And by all accounts, NBC's investment in a multimedia approach to the 2008 Olympics were more than a success. According to The Financial Times, more than 50 million visited NBColympics.com, and 6 million tried NBC's mobile content. According to the New York Times, NBCOlympics.com streamed more than 2,200 hours of live content, "served up more than 1.2 billion pages and 72 million video streams through Saturday, more than doubling the combined traffic to its site during the 2004 Games in Athens and the 2006 Games in Turin", and pulled in $5.75 million in revenue from online video ads alone.

Here’s looking ahead to London 2012…as I anticipate the new technologies that will continue to enhance my Olympic experience.

-Julie Buckley