PC39
Oct 29th, 2008
Inside the Olympics: An Architecture and Development Review
Hear about the end-to-end architecture that was developed for the 2008 Olympic Games online video broadcast experience. Learn about the capture/encoding process from Beijing, back haul to USA, massively cached CDN delivery, adaptive streaming, and Microsoft Silverlight UI development. Learn how to implement a similar solution and understand how and where to apply Silverlight2 technologies.

Speakers

Eric Schmidt
The presentation started with an overview and demo of the existing Olympics Web site and the various components of the Web site. He focused on the video capabilities and how the content was in sync with it. The video options comprised: Full-screen live and picture-in-picture, highlight reel, and primetime. / Mentioned Technologies
·  Silverlight
·  Streaming Media
·  Windows Media Player
·  XAML
·  Visual Studio
NBC had big goals coming into the Olympics:
·  Deliver every minute of every sport live from Beijing to the Web
o  HD quality
o  Break the mold user experience
o  Make it feel solid-state and behave like TV
·  Reach the broadest audience possible
·  High dwell time
·  Quality and innovative impressions for their advertisers
Here are the resulting statistics from the 19 days of the Olympics:
·  1.3 billion page views
·  50 million unique visitors
·  70 million videos watched
·  27 min of viewing per session
·  600 million min of video
·  5000 unique clips viewed per day
·  35 million mobile views
·  130 thousand peak streams
·  3.4 petabytes of video delivered
To accomplish the above business goals they broke the delivery down to the following “Content Packages”
·  Live
o  2200 hrs and up to 35 concurrent streams
o  Synced with live commentary and play by play
·  Rewind
o  Video-on-demand archives
o  Available within 1 hr
·  Highlights
o  3-5min highlights of individual events
o  Varying degrees of graphics and voice commentary
o  X hours
·  Encores
o  Broadcast replays
o  Cut-aways and broadcast commercials removed
This was a massively complex project to plan and it involved 10+ teams around the world. To get this done in basically a 14-month timeframe, the following approaches were taken:
·  Anticipate content using large spreadsheet
o  When, where, size
o  Use to determine CPU, power, cooling, storage, and ingress/egress needs
·  Production schedule drove advertising schedule
·  With the many geographically dispersed teams, the PMs decided it was critical to have face-to-face meetings on a regular basis even though it added to the cost.
·  They built a proprietary workflow engine on top of SharePoint to drive the flow of content/videos through the entire system.
Some of the technical requirements and boundaries they had to work within included:
·  Encoding profiles
o  Built for 1024x768
o  Needed to meet IOC requirements
o  Restricted to 40 MB line out from Beijing
o  Also factored in the "last mile" requirements around user PC's and ISP bandwidth capabilities
o  Could only deliver to US IP addresses
·  The flow of getting data from events to users
a.  Multiple cameras at each event
i.  Routed to international broadcast center in HD PAL
b.  Linked to live encoder farm
c.  Linked to two Windows Media Services boxes
d.  Streams directed back to NY servers
e.  Replicated to farm of Windows Media Services boxes
In addition to the “Live” content there were many other deliveries that factored into meeting the Web site and business requirements:
·  Rewind encoding
·  Highlights factory
·  Encore publishing
·  Scheduling
·  Ad booking
A big part of the Web site design was affected by providing both Windows Media and Silverlight video players so they could have a very broad consumer reach. Some of the motivations for including Windows Media Player as an option were related to the lack of Silverlight base installed, Silverlight’s beta , and WMP’s proven track record.

Conclusion

The Olympics Web experience was a great success for NBC and Microsoft. The ability to turn around a site of this complexity in 14 months and dealing with pushing 2200 hours of video from an office in Beijing that only had 40 MB of bandwidth are just astounding. Microsoft once again has shown that it can step up and deliver great technology that is fast, reliable, and quick to market.

Mike Finley

Microsoft - Enterprise Consultant