How NBC brought the Olympics from Beijing to New York to You.

Back during Cisco Live, we did a co-presentation with NBC Universal, which talked about how they built and managed the network that delivered live coverage of the Beijing Olympics to not only millions of television viewers, but also to online and mobile viewers as well.

We now present to you this video of the engineering team responsible, explaining how they did it, (and how they employed NetQoS to ensure optimum network performance – hey, there’s a reason you’re reading about it on our blog!)

If you’re not up for watching the 5-part, 45 minute video, here are some interesting tidbits to take away from it:

• In 1996 Atlanta, NBC had 172 hours worth of coverage. In 2000 in Sydney, they brought CNBC and MSNBC on board and covered 442 hours. In 2004 for the Athens games, with the addition of USA, Bravo, Telemundo, and Universal HD, they covered 1,219 hours – 70 hours of programming content for any 24 hour period in Athens. But in Beijing, they covered over 3,600 hours, using online distribution, for 211 hours of coverage for any 24 hour period in Beijing. This included clips and highlights, as well as live streaming on NBCOlympics.com.
• There were 1.3 billion pageviews, 50 million unique visitors, 31.5 million hours of videos viewed, 35 million mobile views, 130,000 peak streams and 3.4 petabytes of video delivered. In context, if you stacked 3.4 petabytes in data on 1.44M floppies, then laid the stack down on the ground, you’d reach from New York to L.A. “Simply put, it was the largest media event in television history.”
• The cameramen were in Beijing, obviously, but the editors were in New York, who got low-rez proxy copies of all of the footage as it came in, chose the shots they wanted, then got high resolution video (at 300Mbps!) of those shots for broadcast.
• The network didn’t just handle video but also allowed on-air commentators and producers in both Beijing and New York information on how athletes were performing in the games as that information came in – that is, as each goal was scored and each lap was finished.
• Finally, the production on-air was “flawless,” the ratings came in above estimate, and advertising sales were $50M higher than expected.