Olympics Madness - The Video Broadcast and Production Paradigm Shift

Update: Peter over at SAI has a counter point to the NBC coverage. He is referring to how the PGA golf event will be broadcasted. This brings up a good point that I was thinking about this morning. The Olypmics is a known guestimate of size but what about the recent US Open playoff where Tiger Woods and Roco went at it on Monday. From my sources CIOs were screeming bloody murder about the amount of bandwidth being used. What about those kinds of flash crowds - you need fast provisioning of pipe and intelligence. Peter Kafka’s story is worth a read.

The amount of coverage at the Olypmics is significant and all of the video will be in digital. I found this podcast from Cisco that talks about the challenges from a network perspective.

The podcast is here.

I’m trying to get Cisco on the phone to go into detail about the provisioning and systems level design. This could be a benchmark for all live events.

The question that I have is will this be a new model in doing massive live events or just live events. There are many companies out there now doing Live video from Lifecasting to major broadcasters.

The only issue that I have with the Olympics is that the only player is Silverlight which isn’t exactly the standard in desktops. Google is also doing some work on the mobile side and videos on YouTube.

The new broadcasting paradigm needs to connect with a new set of users. This morning I asked my 11 year old if she want to watch the Olympics (either online or on TV) - she said that she’d rather go to the movies. Very telling.

John Earnhardt just put the link in the comments below but here is the embed from YouTube.