If a CDN does its job correctly, the audience should never know it is there. That’s because viewers should be able to focus on the content of the media, instead of dealing with technology issues like waiting rooms, video stuttering, or worse.

In an event like the Olympics, there were many engineers working behind the scenes 24×7 here at Limelight Networks to make sure the viewing audience didn’t notice us and instead could focus on the stories that were unfolding at the Games. We caught up with a few of our engineering crew as they were on a break, in an effort to document a bit of the behind-the-scenes happenings during the production of the Games. These engineers keep our customers in the limelight every day, and now, for six minutes, its their turn. Enjoy!

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting on new stats from Nielson and NBC about NBCOlympics.com. Among the highlights:

• Online unique users jumped from 4.2 million on Friday (5.7% of the Olympic audience) to 7.8 million (7.6% of the audience) on Monday.
• NBCOlympics.com in the first four days saw 373.9 million page views and 17.7 million video streams, which works out to roughly one video stream per 20 page views. NBC research shows that 40% of NBCOlympics.com users surveyed utilized the VOD to view what they had already seen.
• Unique viewers jumped 85% on Monday to 2 million. The increase is tied in part to the at-work audience, which is in front of a computer instead of a TV during the workday.
• NBCOlympics.com saw 4.7 million unique visitors on Monday, up from 2.6 million on the opening day.
• There were 1.7 million video streams for Sunday night’s U.S.-winning 400-meter freestyle relay race (Michael Phelps’ second gold medal).

NBC has released more information about the traffic on NBCOlympics.com on MSN, , including the most popular events that are being watched on-demand. Here are the current details:

ONE MILLION PLUS STREAMS OF LAST NIGHT’S RELAY ACCESSED AT NBCOLYMPICS.COM ON MSN:

As of 4:30 p.m. ET today 1.1 million video streams of last night’s historic 4×100m relay have been accessed at NBCOlympics.com, making it the most watched video ever from the site.

• NBCOlympics.com on MSN continued its dominance on Sunday with 66.7 million page views, 5.1 million unique users and more than 3.4 million video streams.
• Through three days NBCOlympics.com has totaled 199.3 million page views. By the day’s end NBCOlympics.com will have surpassed the total page views for the entire 2004 Athens Games (229.9 million).
• NBCOlympics.com’s total video streams to date are 11.1 million, which is five times more than the total for the entire Athens Games (2.2 million).

TOP VIDEO STREAMS TODAY ON NBCOLYMPICS.COM:

1. U.S. Wins 4×100m Relay

2. Beijing and Beyond Feature

3. Phelps wins 400m IM

4. Women’s Fencing - Foil

5. U.S.-China Basketball preview

NBC has reported (and also told The Wall Street Journal) that NBCOlympics.com is off to a great start. Here’s the text from their official press release:

NBCOlympics.com followed up its record day on 8/8/08 with another enormous day of traffic. On Saturday (traditionally the lowest trafficked day of the week), the site garnered 62.7 million page views an increase of 475 percent from the opening day of competition of the Athens Games in 2006 (10.9 million).

Through two days NBCOlympics.com has totaled 132.6 million page views compared to 17.9 million page views for the first two days of the Athens Games an increase of 641 percent.

NBCOlympics.com registered 3.1 million video streams yesterday. By comparison, in Athens, the first day of competition received 115,014 video streams.

4.83 million unique users logged onto NBCOlympics.com yesterday an increase from the 4.21 million for 8/8/08 and nearly six times the unique users from the first day of competition in Athens (816,609 million).

NBC Universal, broadcasting its record 11th Olympics and surpassing ABC for the most Olympics broadcast by any network, will present an unprecedented 3,600 hours of Beijing Olympic Games coverage, the most ambitious single media project in history featuring the most live coverage (nearly 2,900 live hours in total), across the most platforms, of any Summer Olympics in history.

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!