Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK)

CTV at 2010 Olympic Winter Games


CTV Streams 6.2 Petabytes of Winter Olympics To over 3.9 Million Visitors, Making Every Second Count

  • Get a Quote
  • Get a Live Demo
  • " We delivered millions of hours of live and on-demand video, with an average viewer on any given day of the Games watching 56 minutes of video online."

    Alon Marcovici
    Vice President of Digital Media and Research
    Canada's Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium

Situation

For 17 days in February 2010, the world came together to watch the spectacular accomplishments of world-class athletes participating in the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver. Competitors performed gravity-defying aerials, reached record-breaking speeds, and took to the ice in Vancouver and Whistler, British Columbia, Canada.

"Olympic athletes spend years training for an event that may last a few seconds. For each athlete, getting to that one moment is often the result of monumental community support," explains Alon Marcovici, Vice President of Digital Media and Research for Canada's Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium. "We wanted to make every second of every event available online to ensure that we honored the community of fans and their personal dedication."

Solution: Encoding, Provisioning and Processing

iStreamPlanet handled the video workflow consisting of the acquisition of 28 concurrent HD video feeds, including:

  • Venue and broadcast streams from the International Broadcast Center in Vancouver and satellite streams via CTV in Toronto.
  • Decoding of the multicast feeds to HD-SDI.
  • Routing of the feeds to assigned encoders.
  • Provisioning of all IIS Smooth Streaming publishing points.
  • Starting and stopping of Inlet Spinnaker HD Encoders via an Inlet API.

iStreamPlanet WOC during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics

The iStreamPlanet origin located at the SuperNAP data center in Las Vegas was run across three server groups or pods, each for the primary and the secondary origins. Each pod included one ingest, one live, one delayed, and one video-on-demand (VOD) server all running Windows Server 2008 R2 and IIS Media Services 3.0. iStreamPlanet used IIS Media Services APIs to automate management of all publishing points.

"Scale and reliability were what set this event apart from any other. At one point, we were creating and ingesting 858 megabits per second worth of content," says Mio Babic, CEO of iStreamPlanet. "That really wouldn't have been possible without IIS Smooth Streaming technology."

» Read the complete case study on Microsoft.com