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Getting the most from your camcorder: tips, tricks, and new products for those who want to take better videos.
Camcorders, Tech and Random Rants Blog
Getting the most from your camcorder: tips, tricks, and new products for those who want to take better videos.
Aug 8, 2008 9:00 AM
Posted by Joseph Devlin
Will Olympic coverage change online video forever?
Posted by Joseph Devlin
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Get ready for the first online Olympics! If everything goes the way it is supposed to, the Beijing Olympics are going to boost public recognition of online video like nothing has ever done before. If there are major glitches there is going to be a lot of finger pointing. During the 2006 Torino games two hours of coverage was streamed live over the Web. This year in Beijing, NBC promises 2,200 hours of live Internet coverage, plus an additional 3,000 hours of on-demand  video providing highlights, recaps, profiles of athletes, and the like. Multitaskers are being told that the feed will include 20 concurrent streams, and that fans will be able to watch 4 sports at a time on a single computer screen. That's a lot more content than sports fans will be able to get by watching TV. Like many of you I expect to be spending a lot of time over the next two weeks seeing what works and what does not. Here are a couple of issues I am going to be looking at closely: Can China and NBC maintain control over Olympic coverage? Who's going to win the race to stream? NBC paid $894 million for the rights to carry the games across all mediums in the US. China is spending billions to host the games. No surprise that they are both working hard to keep control of the feed. Will they be able to do so with millions of cell-phone and camcorder equipped fans attending the games is anyone's guess. NBC Olympics.com is the official portal for all things Olympic in the US. This is where you are supposed to look to find Internet or mobile video about the Olympics (NBC runs mirror sites for mobile and Spanish coverage). NBC is trying to manage this feed to maximize the audience and profitability. Some of the decisions NBC is making are going to annoy lots of folks who are already on the lookout for less official alternatives. For example, NBC decided to delay streaming of the Opening Ceremony by 12 hours in order reach the largest possible US audience. Can they keep the lid on when 91 thousand people watched the show live, and hundreds of millions more watched it stream or broadcast live elsewhere in the world. YouTube broadcasted the opening more of less live in 77 countries where digital rights were not so closely held. Not in the US! YouTube is working hard to respect NBC's rights. A YouTube post about the opening ceremony rehearsals was pulled down quickly. So was a popular animation of a blood-rimmed Olympic silhouette formed by firing squad bullets. Search YouTube in the US for "Beijing Olympic Opening" 4 hours after they are over and you will find old news reports saying they will be spectacular and one posting from Greece showing what I think is two guys rehearsing their opening routine. Can you beat the NBC restrictions and catch live streams? Sure you can! This morning Media Bistro posted links to an Italian YouTube feed of the Opening. NBC currently plans to delay streaming of high profile events till after they have aired on TV on the West Coast. Not good enough for sports fans who are sure to start sharing ways to get around the restrictions. Will NBC and YouTube change their policies when this starts to happen? It will be interesting to follow. Will Olympic Coverage boost usage of the Microsoft SilverLight player? NBC chose Microsoft's SilverLight player to power its online Olympic offering. I have read that you are not going to be forced to use SilverLight to get feeds from NBC Olympics.com, but I don't see how. The fist time I logged into the site I was told to download the new SilverLight2.0 Beta. The player that loaded is very nice. It provides intuitive menus, runs in its own window separately from the browser, and allows you to watch up to four events at a single time. By all accounts Microsoft spent a ton of money building up the network needed to support the Olympics. Millions are sure to install the SilverLight player to watch the Olympics. I will be real interested to how Microsoft uses all these new installs to chip away at Adobe Flash. This will be especially interesting since Flash is the Olympic player of choice much of the rest of the world. Will people annoyed at US delays start accessing Flash coverage elsewhere? How will the public respond to the online commercials? The Olympics provide a new opportunity to teach people that online commercial endorsement don't have to be bad. But it has to be done the right way. I am assuming that many of companies that are buying TV spots are also going to buy time online. This offers some great opportunity for complementary marketing where the pieces look the same but are not clones of each other. People log into the SuperBowl to watch the commercials. Why can't they do the same for the Olympics? For example Coke is producing a special red bottle for the Olympics. Lots of creative potential there! I wanna see how this is played out. Will the games prove the worth of Google DoubleClick Instream? The Olympics are going to provide the first large scale test of Google's DoubleClick In-Stream video ad-serving solution. NBC is going to be using this service to insert ads into the streams. How will users respond to the ads forced upon them? Will the networks be up to the demand? Is the Microsoft network, banks of XP servers, installed base of Microsoft SilerStream players, and Cisco communications network gong to be able to handle all the traffic that is going to be generated. Remember NBC is promising almost 6000 hours of HD quality online video, with up to 20 consecutive live streams, the potential for 4 screens of live events running on every single PC. Pull it off and the companies involved are going to gain major bragging rights. A few failures are going to make them all look like goats. A watershed moment for better quality online video? NBC and the Chinese are promising an HD quality event. In June NBC switched to all HD cameras (I will cover this in my next post). The Chinese built an all HD infrastructure to handle all the feeds. Will the Olympics set a new standard for the way that online video is supposed to look? Let us know what you think. Technorati Tags:
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