Powering the Online Viewing Experience for the 2008 Summer Games

This morning, we announced that we will be providing content delivery services to NBCOlympics.com on MSN for their coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. All of the video you will watch when you visit NBCOlympics.com will be stored on our servers and delivered from our network over our media-grade optical backbone. We are very excited to be involved in such a groundbreaking event, and are working hard to make sure the online viewing experience is a success.

We’ll be covering some of the specifics of our involvement in this space over the next few weeks (as the Games unfold), but since our press release went out today we wanted to provide some highlights of what you can expect when you visit NBCOlympics.com:

• Over 2200 hours of live event streaming sent to the browsers of NBC’s U.S. audience through LimelightSTREAM.
• Over 3600 hours of on-demand access to video content, including full-event replays, highlights, features, interviews and encore packages — all stored on Lmelight Network services and made available at the click of a mouse through LimelightDELIVER.
• A next-generation Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 desktop player with an absolutely unbelievable user experience — four live video streams at once, picture-in-picture capabilities, social networking features, and on-screen data overlays that provide results, statistics, bios, and more.

On the technical side, we worked closely with the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 team to create a massive, dedicated pool of servers capable of supporting a high rate of Windows Media traffic. Our professional services team is also providing 24×7 monitoring and onsite support for the length of the Olympics broadcast.

If you’re looking for more information, there is good coverage of the technical side of these Olympics here, here, and here.

Here’s looking forward to making the Beijing Olympics a record-breaking Internet event!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 7:56 am and is filed under Content Delivery Network, olympics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.