IEEE Spectrum July, 2012 - 10

How you will see the London olympics
Olympic Broadcasting
Services (OBS) shoots
events in high definition.

1

2

Uncompressed data travel through
more than 700 fiber optic circuits to
the International Broadcast Centre
(IBC) inside Olympic Park.

3

OBS transmits live streams and
programming by satellite to
broadcasters worldwide. NBC and
other broadcasters at the IBC receive
the data by cable in both broadcast
and Internet Protocol formats.

Satellite

IBC

NBC

Broadcast

IP stream

NBC's "virtual decks"
convert the broadcast
streams to high- and lowresolution video files.

4

NBC hands off
the IP streams to
Google's YouTube.

4

Low-res
FORscene
Edit lists

YouTube

YouTube routes
the streams to
FORscene, a cloudbased videoediting platform.
Producers at the IBC and at NBC
headquarters use low-res broadcast
and IP streams to make edit lists.

5

High-res data route to
a repository at the IBC,
which is mirrored at NBC
headquarters. Edit lists
from the virtual decks serve
as instructions for cutting
together broadcastquality programming and
highlights clips.

YouTube distributes
the streams live over
its content delivery
network. The data
is also cached at the
edges of the network
where highlights
clips are assembled
using the edit lists.

6
Satellite receivers
Cable set-top boxes
Terrestrial broadcast

10

5

6
NBC delivers
content to
televisions.

NA * IEEE SpEctrum * july 2012

A YouTube player on
NBCOlympics.com
pulls data from
the caches, which
it streams to
authorized viewers.

Phones
PCs
Tablets

to screen the games in their home
countries [see "Olympics Everywhere"].
In addition to distributing Olympics
coverage at an unprecedented scale,
some broadcasters are debuting new
production technologies. OBS, for
example, will shoot some events, such as
synchronized diving and gymnastics, in
3-D. And camera crews at the velodrome,
basketball arena, and certain other
venues will shoot in Super Hi-vision,
a next-generation television format
offering 16 times as many pixels as HD.
The U.S.-based National Broadcasting Co. (NBC) is also trying out
new equipment. During past games,
producers recorded incoming footage
onto optical disks, which they manually
loaded into edit decks to cut together
programs. If multiple producers wanted
to cut from the same footage, they had to
record onto multiple disks. "In Beijing,
we had hundreds of tape machines all
recording the same thing," says Darryl
Jefferson, NBC's post-production director.
"It was extremely redundant and
expensive." This year, NBC has replaced
the physical decks with virtual ones.
The new decks allow producers to view
low-resolution versions of the streaming
footage while high-resolution files are
simultaneously written to a database.
"Anyone can log in to the management
system and start cutting in real time as
the file is growing," Jefferson explains.
These Olympics are also the first
time that NBC and the BBC will stream
all Olympic events live on the Web.
In partnership with Google, NBC will
use the Internet company's YouTube
player and content-delivery network
to deliver Internet Protocol versions
of its broadcast streams to viewers
on computers and mobile devices.
"When you're watching the Olympics,
it seems like a seamless and singular process," says Shujaat Ali, director of digital
services at NBC. "But there's hundreds
of pieces that have to work together. The
breadth of what happens over 19 days is
just incredible."
-Ariel Bleicher
spectrum.ieee.org

emily cooper

Olympics Everywhere
http://www.NBCOlympics.com http://spectrum.ieee.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum July, 2012
