The 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver marked the sixth of seven consecutive Olympic broadcasts 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 events in HD via 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 develop a way to deliver midstream ads while providing an engaging experience for Olympics enthusiasts.
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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. |
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Perkins Miller, Senior Vice President of Digital Media, NBC Sports |
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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.
“Two critical goals for covering the Vancouver Olympics were speed-of-delivery and cost,” says Perkins Miller, Senior Vice President of Digital Media at NBC Sports. The ad delivery was equally important to NBC. “When we broadcast the Olympics, of course we want to help our partners deliver their message through advertising,” he adds.
Solution
NBC chose Microsoft partners and technologies—featuring Microsoft Silverlight, the Silverlight Media Framework, and Internet Information Services (IIS) Media Services 3.0 technology running on Windows Server 2008—to create a platform for delivering online video programming supported by sophisticated ad support.
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.
| Total events covered |
300 events, 86 of which were medal events |
| Hours of video consumed |
4.4 million |
| Peak concurrent active live streams |
19 (out of 24 total) |
| Peak concurrent viewers |
181,000 |
| Total amount of video delivered |
3.6 petabytes |
| Total video streams |
50.5 million |
| Total number of unique visitors who consumed video |
15.8 million |
| Photos |
41,560 |
| Photo galleries |
1,573 |
| Video quality |
720p HD for both live and on-demand |
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.
Video Player
California-based Vertigo designed and developed NBC’s 2010 Winter Olympics video player and photo viewer. The Vertigo team extended core functionality in the
Silverlight Media Framework to incorporate the HD video support, DVR-style controls, rich data integration, and social-media functionality.
In addition, the Vertigo team built in specific support for playing ads, including integration with DoubleClick, which ensured Interactive Advertising Bureau–certified ad delivery. The player “listened” for ad markers through IIS Smooth Streaming. As Bob Cowherd, Senior Software Engineer with Vertigo explains, “IIS Smooth Streaming allows us to integrate ads into the live stream to deliver a seamless, broadcast-like experience.”
Real-Time Monitoring and Analysis
Conviva integrated its Pulse management console with the video player to monitor real-time video quality, viewer engagement, distribution resource performance, and operational diagnostics. For instance, Conviva provided real-time data on player configuration errors to the NBC management team and Akamai augmented its own CDN reporting with this data.
This information also helped to ensure that scheduling, page promotion, and advertising were all synchronized and focused on a good user experience while supporting the tremendous live-event traffic levels.
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Figure 1. Ad-insertion tool by deltatre, featuring the streamed video and
ad-pod selection buttons. |
Ad-Insertion Tool
deltatre s.p.a. of Torino, Italy, built the NBC Olympics Web site, using its sports-specific content management system (CMS) for the creation and operation of the site. To give ad operators from NBC a fast way to choose a preconfigured ad pod and select a precise timeline marker for delivery,
deltatre incorporated an ad-insertion tool into the CMS. The tool allowed NBC to place ad markers very precisely in the live and on-demand stream and to change the ads presented at almost any time based on fulfillment and consumption data.
NBC marked the live stream for opportunities to place ads—for instance, during icing breaks in hockey or time between jumps in ski jumping. Figure 1 shows the interface of the ad-insertion tool, including the buttons that let operators choose among preconfigured ad types.
“The ad information is delivered right in the stream,” explains Cowherd. “When the player plays back the stream, it receives a marker in the stream that tells it exactly where to play the ad.”
Silverlight Rough Cut Editor
To speed up the highlights-creation process, NBC took advantage of the Silverlight Rough Cut Editor built by Southworks.
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IIS Smooth Streaming allows us to integrate ads into the live stream to deliver a seamless, broadcast-like experience. |
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Bob Cowherd, Senior Software Engineer, Vertigo |
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Through the Rough Cut Editor interface, NBC production assistants quickly inserted markers in the video feeds to delineate highlights. The designated start and stop times for each clip in the new highlight were then delivered to the player in an XML file called an IIS Smooth Streaming composite stream manifest (.csm), which acts much like a playlist. As illustrated in Figure 2, the fragments are not copied into the manifest; instead, references are made to the fragments in the original stream.
As soon as the streaming for an event began, editors could begin work, which meant that the highlights for an event could be delivered while it was still in progress.
Benefits
With its live and on-demand delivery of the 2010 Winter Olympics online, NBC attracted millions of visitors with a richer set of visual experiences and near-instant availability of highlights to viewers while providing advertising partners with more ways to deliver their messages.
“Being able to use Microsoft technology to deliver advertising efficiently has been incredibly valuable to us,” says Miller.
Compelling Experience for Increased Traffic
By seamlessly blending live and archived video assets and accelerating the availability of highlights, NBC attracted 710 million page views and recorded 46 million unique visits to its flagship Olympics site.
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| Figure 2. Example of composite manifest for highlights clip for a hockey game. |
The heavy traffic, combined with the compelling experience, equated to a perfect situation for NBC’s advertising partners.
Flexible, Sophisticated Ad Integration
For the Olympics in Beijing, the only advertising options included a preroll ad synchronized with a companion ad. For Olympics in Vancouver, NBC inserted appropriate ads to play at specific times during a live or video-on-demand event, for instance during a time-out or other break.
The ad integration was sophisticated and flexible, allowing NBC to deliver different ads within the same content for both live and on-demand scenarios. This flexibility was achieved through an “addendum manifest,” in concert with the old manifest, which allowed ads to be modified on-the-fly. This approach, combined with real-time telemetry, allowed NBC to achieve the right balance between content with ads delivered midstream and sponsorship goals.
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- Encryption for the Silverlight-based video-player application. Dotfuscator from PreEmptive Solutions encrypted the video player’s .xap files.
- Real-time health monitoring of the IIS Smooth Streaming infrastructure. Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Wintellect created specialized management packs for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager that worked through an interface with IIS Media Services APIs.
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“We came up with a lot of business logic to control how often a viewer would receive an ad,” explains Miller. “It's not intrusive to the user, and it highlights the value of the technology.”
In addition, NBC could change the ads that were being delivered at any time, based on information provided by real-time analytics. “Armed with real-time insights from Conviva about the size and viewing trends of the entire online fan base, NBC had a unique opportunity to make quick and informed decisions about when to run ads,” explains Chris Amen-Kroeger, Vice President of Systems Engineering at Conviva.
Faster Highlights Delivery
The Rough Cut Editor helped NBC deliver exciting clips from an event or several events more quickly than before.
“The Silverlight Rough Cut Editor helped us to achieve those goals by enabling editors to cut short-form highlights from long-form live coverage through a Web-based editor and have them published to the site within seconds—even while the event was still in progress,” explains Perkins. “This dramatically reduced our costs and made it easier and faster to deliver video clips.”
Additional Resources
Microsoft Silverlight
Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET-based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web and mobile devices. Fully supported by Visual Studio and Expression Blend, Silverlight includes major media enhancements, out-of-browser support for Web applications on the desktop, smooth streaming capabilities, browser ubiquity, GPU acceleration, and support for 3D graphics and H.264 video.
For more information about Silverlight, visit www.microsoft.com/silverlight and for resources, visit silverlight.net.
The open-source Silverlight Media Framework from Microsoft enables developers to quickly deploy a robust, scalable, customizable media player for IIS Smooth Streaming delivery. The framework builds on the core functionality of the
IIS Smooth Streaming Player Development Kit.
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about NBC Universal products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.nbcuni.com
For more information about Akamai products and services, call (877) 325-2624 or visit the Web site at:
www.akamai.com
For more information about Conviva products and services, call (650) 401-8282 or visit the Web site at:
www.conviva.com
For more information about deltatre products and services, call 39 011 3841 800 or visit the Web site at:
www.deltatre.com
For more information about Inlet Technologies products and services, call 1 (866) 96-INLET or visit the Web site at:
www.inlethd.com
For more information about iStreamPlanet products and services, call (702) 492-5900 or visit the Web site at:
www.istreamplanet.com
For more information about PreEmptive Solutions products and services, call (440) 443-7200 or visit the Web site at:
www.preemptive.com
For more information about Southworks products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.southworksinc.com
For more information about Vertigo products and services, call (510) 307-8200 or visit the Web site at:
www.vertigo.com
For more information about Wintellect products and services, call (877) 968-5528 or visit the Web site at:
www.wintellect.com
