Streaming On An Olympic Scale
Every two years, people around the world gather around their screens to watch the best athletes on the planet compete for the gold
. And with each biennial edition of the Games, more and more of those screens are something other than a television. Two years can be an eon in Internet time, and 2012 promises to be the most streamed, most social, most mobile Olympics ever. iStream Planets Vice President of Operations Bhavesh Upadhyaya has been on the front lines of streaming for the past two Olympics, and won an Emmy for his role in the 2008 Beijing games. Hes one of the few individuals who has a first-hand sense of the massive scale and complexity of live-streaming the scores of events and thousands of hours that make up the Olympics. Benchmark recently spoke with Bhavesh to learn about his experiences with the Olympics and his perspective on the upcoming London games.
iStream Planet's Bhavesh Upadhyaya talks about streaming the world's most-watched games
Benchmark: You worked on streaming the Beijing Olympics. What was your role?
Bhavesh Upadhyaya: I was a consultant for NBC. I was brought in 14 months before the Olympics to help architect the video workflow. And that two-month project turned into a 14-month project and ended up with me being in Beijing for six weeks. It was absolutely a once in a lifetime experience to put something like that together.
Benchmark: Can you give us a sense of the scope of that?
Bhavesh Upadhyaya: At that time, we basically delivered with the exception of the major sports every single moment of the Olympics live online from Beijing to the entire audience of the United States. The major sports were recorded so that they could be watched on TV first and then, after a short time, they were available on-demand online after the fact.
But up until that point, there were thousands of hours of live content being delivered, plus more on-demand content of clips that were custom-created just for the Internet audience, or amazing clips that came from what was done on TV.
Benchmark: And what happens before is
load testing, essentially? Are you stressing the system out at certain levels to see how far you can go?
Bhavesh Upadhyaya: Absolutely. You can't go into a large event like this without having a comfort level to know, at least to a certain degree, what is your limit? At what point should you start to get nervous?
Benchmark: Since then youve joined iStream Planet. What role has iStream Planet played in the
Olympic Games?
Bhavesh Upadhyaya: For the Vancouver Games, we delivered all of the live video. With Vancouver, we reached another threshold it was the first HD video delivery. I think we had at the peak 27 simultaneous live streams going, delivered in 720p HD over the Internet. And we did the delivery not just for the United States this time for NBC, but also CTV and NRK in Norway. So all the Canadians, and the United States and Norway audiences saw the bits that were generated by us.
Benchmark: How do you prepare to handle an event of this magnitude? How do you make sure that the streaming is going to work without a hitch?
Bhavesh Upadhyaya: It's about two aspects two partnerships that you have to generally set up. One is creating a resilient infrastructure on the content creation end. And then the other part is getting the delivery part, the relationship with the CDNs, available so they can actually spread it out to the last mile. We want to make sure that we segregate the difference between content creation and content delivery.
by: Keynote
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