NBC Olympics: Digital Media Challenge?

The Olympic Games: Most Challenging Digital Media Supply Chain Ever?
Posted August 25th, 2008 by Tom Ohanian

The just-concluded Summer Olympic Games featured an unprecedented amount of coverage over an equally unprecedented series of distribution types. Consider some of the pre-event statistics cited publicly:

* A minimum of 3,600 hours of broadcast coverage

* A minimum of 2,900 hours of live programming

* A minimum of 2,200 hours of streaming coverage on NBCOlympics.com

* All footage acquired in HD and protected for 4:3 aspect ratio consumption

* Coverage of all 302 unique Olympic events

* U.S.-based coverage on NBC, USA Network, Universal HD, Oxygen, CNBC, and Telemundo

* Supplying content to a myriad of partners like Google, which streamed content on YouTube

* Video on Demand (VOD) of noteworthy Olympics coverage in an offering entitled “Highlights,” “Rewinds”, and “Encores”.

* Supplying content to Amazon, NBC2Go, and mobile phones

Just the ability to cover 302 events, all in HD, would be complex enough. But adding the 360-media component to the efforts required a staggering amount of work to be done to ensure that the correct content was in the proper resolution, frame rate, aspect ratio, and scan type.