Investor's Business Daily
Hordes Of Streaming Fans Can Watch Olympics
Friday August 1, 6:32 pm ET
Julie Vallone
Matthew Rechs remembers his mother and grandparents waking up at 3 a.m. to watch the Olympics.
"The Olympics were huge in my family, and that's the only way they could catch the events they wanted to see," Rechs said. "Throughout the history of the Olympics, most people haven't been able to see most of Games. They were able to read about them in the paper or catch whatever highlights the TV network decided to show."
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Times have changed, and Rechs is one of the people at the forefront of that change.
He's chief technology officer for Los Angeles-based Schematic, a unit of ad firm WPP Digital.
Schematic helped develop Microsoft's (NasdaqGS:MSFT - News) Silverlight 2 video player, software that shows video on Web sites.
NBC is using Silverlight to stream high-quality video of the 2008 Beijing Olympics -- which begin Friday and run through Aug. 24 -- over the Web.
"The (Silverlight) player has been designed to give viewers the best experience possible," Rechs said. "You'll be able to watch four simultaneous video streams of the live coverage."
Users can toggle among the four different events, he says, make one big and the others small, and do a picture-in-picture setup where a smaller stream appears within a larger one. If viewers need to mute the sound, they can choose to see the broadcasters' event commentary in text form, in a closed-caption-type stream.
The Online Olympics
With the help of the Silverlight player and other technologies, NBC will bring fans an unprecedented level of online Olympic coverage on its NBCOlympics.com Web site, and on mobile devices.
The network plans to stream 2,200 hours of 25 events live and make almost all of the 4,000 hours of the Games available on video archives for North American Web users.
NBC's online coverage of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens featured text articles, with limited video highlights. Online coverage of the '06 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, had more video, but not as much as will these Games.
"In (Turin) we streamed live one two-hour gold medal hockey game. Now we are streaming live 2,200 hours," said Adam Freifeld, an NBC Sports spokesman. "The scope of what we are doing has never been attempted."
The network is partnering with Microsoft not only through the use of the Silverlight player, but also through its NBCOlympics2Go. This service lets people who have Microsoft's Vista operating system download any event from the Games to watch on their laptops and mobile devices.
The network also has signed deals with AT&T (NYSE:T - News), which will carry the NBCOlympics2Go content, and with Verizon Wireless, which will provide streaming video highlights, breaking news and results.
NBC said video content also will be available through service providers Alltel, T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S - News)on "select handsets." Perkins Miller, senior vice president of Digital Media at NBC Sports, says fans should be able to watch on most video-enabled mobile devices.
Whether fans will actually access all that content might come down to a key question: Can they load the Silverlight plug-in? Silverlight, a cross-platform and cross-browser technology, is Microsoft's rival to Adobe Systems' (NasdaqGS:ADBE - News) Flash, widely used by Internet video viewers.
Silverlight already has been used to stream coverage of baseball on MLB.com, by Netflix (NasdaqGS:NFLX - News) for its "Watch Now" feature, and by Fox Movies for new movie trailers.
The Olympics will be by far Microsoft's biggest attempt to push the technology out to the market.
"Not many people have this installed," said Bobby Tulsiani, an analyst with Jupiter Research. "It's a win for Microsoft because anyone who wants to watch the Olympics will end up using Silverlight. It will enable Microsoft to install a base of Silverlight users. But it hasn't been tested on the same scale as Flash."
Tulsiani says NBC is taking a risk by not using the tried and true Flash, which most users already have. He points out that Flash has successfully streamed many big events, including the NCAA basketball tournament, on CBS.com.
"When you make a user download something new and it doesn't work well, a lot of people will abandon it," he said. "It had better work right and it better have good content."
If the technology is a winner, it could mean substantial new online ad revenue for NBC and its partners. NBC hasn't said what sort of revenue it expects from its Olympics effort, online or offline.
"It's hard to say what (ad) percentage will come from TV and from the Internet," Tulsiani said. "But it's clear NBC is definitely making money through its online coverage."
Enticing The Young Crowd
The digital Games might help networks, and the Olympics, attract younger viewers.
Some reports have estimated the average age of viewers -- mostly TV viewers at that time -- for '04 Games at over 40, which doesn't bode well for the popularity of future Olympics.
But NBC's online efforts could resonate with younger viewers, the people most comfortable with online technologies.
"We hope people experience the broadest, deepest coverage of an Olympic Games ever," Miller said, "and find themselves greater fans of the athletes, sports and Olympics."
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