olympics everywhere supplement
special report
The 2012 London Summer Games promise the most comprehensive multi-screen coverage of any Games to date. The 2008 Beijing Games were a breakthrough for online video, as broadcasters such as NBC and CCTV delivered an unparalleled breadth of live and on-demand online coverage. The 2008 Games were an impressive technical achievement, and having an unprecedented range of events covered online in numerous countries was a significant milestone. 2010 moved the bar higher with online coverage in some regions offering HD resolutions, and deeper web and mobile coverage across a greater number of countries - albeit in the smaller scale of the number of Winter Games events versus their Summer counterparts. Mike Nann, director of marketing and communications at Digital Rapids, reports.
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Enabling the ‘every screen’ Games
n contrast to the scenarios above, the technologies being used to deliver multi-screen viewing experiences from London in 2012 will be less ‘cutting edge’ but more mature and evolved,
refining the processes for producing multi-platform deliverables. Consumer expectations for the availability of multi-screen Games coverage are also tremendously high. Where live web coverage of an event was noteworthy just a few years ago as the exception rather than the norm, today it would be significant if an event wasn’t available across all consumer platforms, from the web to tablets and mobile phones. It’s easy to forget that video consumption on tablets wasn’t even a consideration for the 2010 Vancouver Games - the Apple iPad had been announced just days earlier and was not yet shipping. In 2012, tablets are likely to be one of the most-watched devices for viewing the events. Furthermore, while the greatest
breadth and depth of online coverage occurred in larger countries in past years, 2012 will see all Games broadcasters throughout the world facing the expectation of providing complete multi-screen coverage of every event - or at least every event
in which that country’s athletes are participating. Making this a reality will be some
Mike Nann, director of marketing and communications at Digital Rapids.
important core technologies that enable the high-quality viewing experience that today’s consumers expect. And fortunately for smaller media outlets, advances in the efficiency, performance and maturity of these technologies have made them more accessible and cost- effective.
Adapting to increased expectations
One of the most prevalent technologies enabling multi-screen availability of the Games will be adaptive bit rate (ABR) delivery, also known as adaptive streaming. While early precursors to today’s adaptive streaming technologies were experimented with during the 2008 Games, adaptive bit rate delivery has now become commonplace and has been critical to improving the consumer experience on web, mobile and over-the-top (OTT) video services. To recap, adaptive streaming
technologies are designed to address the challenges of delivering video over unmanaged networks - particularly the varying, unpredictable
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nature of viewers’ network bandwidth and device capabilities. By adjusting automatically to these viewing conditions, adaptive bit rate delivery enables higher-quality video with television-like continuity and reliability even under dramatically changing network connectivity and playback conditions. At a technical level, the basis of
adaptive streaming starts with the video encoder, which creates several outputs at different bit rates and frame sizes from the same input source. These outputs are divided up into a series of short, precisely aligned segments, with the segmentation done within the encoder or subsequently in the network with an external segmenting and packaging tool. The segments are served to client devices using the HTTP protocol, leveraging existing web infrastructures and caching technologies. The client player software on the receiving device (PC, mobile phone, tablet, etc) communicates with the server to download the highest-quality segment it can handle under current bandwidth and playback conditions. By doing so, playback effectively switches up and down between the available bit rates to maximise quality at any given time without exceeding available
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