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

When the 2010 Olympic Winter Games came to Vancouver BC, CTV relished the opportunity to transform the presentation of the Games to the home-team crowd. Canada’s largest broadcaster knew that every second of the Olympic Games was meaningful and wanted to provide viewers with continuous, online coverage of every event. With the help of Microsoft and leading partners, CTV implemented a solution that would deliver the Games online via Internet Information Services (IIS) Smooth Streaming to a Microsoft Silverlight–based video player—a solution that even supported midroll ad insertion. The broadcaster delivered 7.2 million hours of live and on-demand HD video, with the average online viewer watching an amazing 111 minutes over the entire Games. Thanks to IIS Smooth Streaming and Silverlight, CTV succeeded in delivering truly unprecedented access to Olympic events and athletes’ stories.

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.

Providing coverage for an event that occurs once every four years brings about fierce pride and pressure for the host. For CTV, the prime network within a consortium of channels that was the rights-holding broadcaster for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, this was a unique opportunity to deliver exceptional access to Olympic events and athletes’ stories.

“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.”

To accomplish this enormous task, CTV broadcasted continuous, live coverage of the games to www.ctvolympics.ca and www.rdsolympiques.ca. Delivering this experience online—up to 14 broadcasts at once—to millions of Canadian viewers was a challenge. The programming had to be compelling enough for people to keep coming back again to watch more videos, and the quality had to be as close to TV as possible.

To provide Canadians with this unprecedented coverage of the Games, CTV turned to Microsoft Silverlight 3 and Internet Information Services (IIS) Smooth Streaming, a feature of IIS Media Services.

The first step in enabling a dynamic viewing experience was to create an infrastructure that supported high-quality, HD coverage of live events. To enable end-to-end delivery of live streams, CTV teamed with several Microsoft partners, including iStreamPlanet, Inlet, Akamai, and deltatre.

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.

Figure 1 illustrates the workflow for the video feeds. The multicast feeds were converted to HD-SDI and transported to a bank of Inlet Spinnaker HD Encoders, which have built-in support for IIS Smooth Streaming. Using a bank of encoders was critical to handle the number of events and to provide multiple streaming bit rates for each event.

The Spinnaker encoders also processed time-code signals to facilitate stream synchronization with play-by-play data in the Silverlight-based player. The video was encoded in a maximum of six streams at resolutions of up to 720p, and then the video was published for the IIS origin servers to process and distribute across the content delivery network.

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. That really wouldn’t have been possible without IIS Smooth Streaming technology. Mio Babic, CEO, iStreamPlanet

“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.”

Content Delivery Network

Content was streamed via the Akamai HD Network—a highly distributed, HTTP-based content delivery network of 65,000 servers—to viewers in Canada.

“The Akamai HD Network is designed to let broadcasters enhance television coverage by enabling the best possible online video experiences, complete with interactivity and broadcast scale,” points out Suzanna Johnson, Director of Marketing at Akamai. “It’s a perfect complement to IIS Smooth Streaming capabilities.”

CTV streamed fully produced content from five networks and complete, live-host broadcast streams from every other sport. In total, sports coverage was always available and reliable, and viewers could choose from up to 14 concurrent streams—all delivered in HD—at any one time.

CTV turned to deltatre s.p.a. of Torino, Italy, to provide real-time scheduling of events in the player of up to 14 broadcasts. One challenge, however, was dealing with changes in schedule. Weather conditions, for instance, sometimes required schedule changes for outdoor events, sometimes with very short notice. Recognizing that this could be confusing to fans who were more familiar with linear broadcasts, deltatre built a real-time scheduling service that helped viewers easily find the event, team, or athlete at any particular time and navigate directly to the video of that preferred event or athlete, either live or on-demand.

deltatre also provided real-time results so that viewers could know exactly what was happening in a sport, at every moment. In addition a viewer programming guide integrated live video with archived content. The results and the guide were implemented as overlays within the body of the video player to provide a seamless viewing experience, along with DVR–style functionality such as pause, rewind, and fast forward. The ability to add this data to the video through IIS Smooth Streaming gave the online audience a richer viewing experience than the TV audience had.

Figure 1. CTV video workflow.

“We were really focused on trying to take TV to TV 2.0. The complementary nature of a fantastic viewing experience on an HD player, combined with DVR-style controls and layered content, took TV to the next level. Maybe this is start of something bigger,” says Marcovici.

“The feature that gets the most jaw-dropping response is the markers in time,” Marcovici continues, “Unlike TV, where you have to rewind to look for the particular moment, with our player, you click a button to view a key event, like a winning goal.”

By taking advantage of the capabilities of IIS Smooth Streaming, deltatre synchronized these key-event markers, in real-time, in both English and French to ensure that Canada’s audience was well served.

CTV also included unobtrusive advertising in the live-host broadcast streams. By using an ad-insertion tool developed by deltatre, CTV identified key areas where advertising opportunities were possible, often on-the-fly, such as during an icing call in an ice hockey game. Then, an operator inserted marks that served as notification to the video player when an advertising opportunity was available. The video player then made a call to the DoubleClick ad server, which delivered one or more ads, depending on the amount of time available. This enabled the broadcaster to serve more ads without the viewer missing an important part of a live event.

“We’re thrilled with the advertising capability,” says Marcovici. “This platform, we believe, is a watershed platform. This is the beginning of something big. And, by all accounts, our advertising partners are very pleased with the results.”

By using Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming, CTV had monumental success in delivering continuous, live online coverage of the Olympic Games. “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,” says Marcovici.

Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium made a significant bet on Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming for our broadcast of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, and we are thrilled with the results. Alon Marcovici, Vice President of Digital Media and Research, Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium

High Engagement with Viewers

Marcovici initially expected most viewers to be interested in a few minutes of highlights and then to move on. Much to his surprise, the average Canadian viewer spent more than an hour watching Winter Olympics video content online every single day.

“Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium made a significant bet on Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming for our broadcast of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, and we are thrilled with the results,” says Marcovici. “With extraordinarily high-quality video and a superior player experience, our viewers enjoyed an outstanding online experience that kept them more engaged and helped us deliver results for our advertisers.”

CTV delivered an Olympic Games experience unlike any other to its online audience. Viewers had unlimited access to more than 2,350 hours of live or previously recorded events, watching competitions seamlessly unfold in HD. “In our digital lounge at the Winter Olympics, when people saw this Silverlight-based video player on the 50-inch screen with the Games playing via IIS Smooth Streaming, it gave them a Eureka moment: ‘Wow, this doesn’t buffer! It’s high quality like TV—only better!’”

Notes Marcovici, “Thanks to Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming, we’ve delivered an experience that surprises and overwhelms people and makes them hesitant to return to the typical online video player.”

By using Silverlight, CTV created a next-generation, multilayered multimedia experience. “We provided a fantastic viewing experience on an HD video player that takes TV to the next level,” sums up Marcovici. CTV received enthusiastic feedback from Canadian viewers, social networkers, and reporters alike over the experience that CTV provided during the Winter Olympics.

• Learn: More about IIS Smooth Streaming
• Read: Why more than 1 in 4 people in Norway tuned in online to watch the Winter Olympic Games, viewing up to 77 minutes per day
• Read: How NBC monetized its online streaming content during the Winter Olympic Games
• Watch: Behind the Scenes with Silverlight and IIS at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver
• Read: How France Télévisions continued to provide a high-quality experience in HD for the Winter Olympic Games