NBC

NBC Universal at 2010 Vancouver Olympics


NBC Streams 4.4 Million Hours of Olympics Video, Delivers Midstream Ads

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  • "One of our goals when we cover the Olympics is to help our partners deliver their message through advertising.… Being able to use Microsoft technology to deliver advertising efficiently has been incredibly valuable to us."

    Perkins Miller
    Senior Vice President of Digital Media
    NBC Sports
iStreamPlanet WOC during the 2010 Vancouver Olympics

Situation

For NBC Universal, which delivered the telecast and online broadcast of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver offered a golden opportunity. With the help of skilled partners, the network aimed to improve the experience in several areas, including capitalizing on prebuilt technology to support a more refined approach to delivering ads and streamlining the delivery of highlights from the events.

Solution: Architecture Overview

iStreamPlanet helped to develop the content acquisition, encoding, and content delivery network (CDN) ingest architecture, including the design and development of the workflow automation service to automate video decoding, routing, publishing-points creation, encoding, and content ingestion into the CDN. The raw video feeds came from Vancouver through NBC's facilities in New York City and onward to iStreamPlanet's facilities in Las Vegas, where the company encoded and distributed up to 24 HD feeds.

From the facilities in Las Vegas, Inlet's Spinnaker technology encoded the video feeds into live IIS Smooth Streaming with six quality levels for each stream.

After the encoding, Akamai servers picked up the live IIS Smooth Streams from Windows Server-based origins operated by iStreamPlanet and used the Akamai HD Network that pushed as much as 200 Gbps.

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