Introduction
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.
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. This article 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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