Microsoft’s Ben Waggoner has posted some more details about March Madness Online Video and the Silverlight player powering it, including the resolutions and data rates used:

Total Bitrate (kbps)	Video Bitrate (kbps)	Audio Bitrate (kbps)	Video Width	Video Height	Pixel Aspect Ratio
1500	1450	48	784	432	1:1
1000	950	48	512	384	4:3
650	615	32	368	272	4:3
350	315	32	240	176	4:3

Video codec used is VC-1 Advanced Profile. Audio codec used is WMA Professional at 44.1 kHz 16-bit stereo.

All March Madness games are being encoded by MLB.com’s encoding facilities using Inlet Spinnaker 7000 encoders. The Spinnakers were configured based on my own recommendations in order to provide maximum quality at all bitrates.

Once they’ve done the official announce, i’ll post more about what the actual ways Silverlight will support H.264, but its good to see the news out there already!

Silverlight evangelist Eric Schmidt stopped in at Channel 9 (Microsoft’s Developer Network forum) and recorded an interview about some of the details that went into how Silverlight was used to present the Olympics, including some of the touchy areas like full screen mode and Geo restrictions. He makes a comment about there being contractual reasons about why true full screen wasn’t implemented and I wish he’d have elaborated, but good info regardless.

Issues with Silverlight or the Site Design

If you are in the US, online video coverage of the Olympics means NBC, who paid almost $900 million dollars for the rights to the US market. Early on, there were complaints about issues around installing and getting Silverlight running. You needed the Silverlight 2 beta in order to view the Olympics. Consequently, those with either the 1.0 release or no version had some problems when they viewed the site, though this is fairly minor at best. It seemed to me however that there was a bigger issue around the over all design and usability of the NBC Olympics portal – a rich interactive platform is only as good as the design, and in this instance, the site was lacking.

I’m not really taking sides on Silverlight vs. Flash in this instance. I work with both platforms, so I suppose that could be seen as self serving, but I genuinely think both should be and are up to the task of delivering a rich media experience. There are elements distinctly missing from the UI of the Silverlight player (like a full screen mode) which seemed like obvious or intentional gaffs. I spoke to my old friends and business partners from Last Exit about the design of the site and their comment was, “There is no central user experience to bring together video and news content. Compare with the embedded experience of BBC iPlayer and its standalone version – same content, but the user can choose to read and watch/listen or just watch.” And this sentiment has been repeated in posts around the web discussing the viewer experience on BBC’s web site.

Taking this all into consideration, the viewing experience is a bit disappointing. However the same mistakes could have been as easily made in Flash (and in fact there are several Flash elements integrated into the non-video portions of the site), so it’s not the fault of the technology here, just the designers (and even then, I suspect it was a decision made higher up the food chain as to what features were in and out). I will say I don’t believe the live Flash video experience would have been as quite as good as the VC-1 streams we’re seeing in the Silverlight player. However, that’s only because NBC would have no doubt implemented On2’s VP6 as the live codec, not H.264 because the live encoders and FMS 3.0 infrastructure to support the newer, higher quality codec, just isn’t built out enough to guarantee it’s as reliable in the lead up to the games. Silverlight had the benefit of just building on top of an existing and fairly extensive WMS infrastructure, so in that respect, it was less of a gamble, despite being a new platform. Users that users would have to download and install in most cases.

NBC Implementation Issues, Rights/Availability, Time Delays, & Lack of Commentary

As I mentioned earlier, NBC has the rights for broadcast in the US market. In the marketing lead up to the Olympics, there seemed to be this message that NBC and its partners were bringing the Olympics to the world,. Well this isn’t really NBC’s fault – it’s the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) and the way they license coverage. Perhaps this issue was much easier in a less global realm. It’s something the IOC should really consider moving forward. Online rights should be considered more global than the traditional broadcast rights, which will naturally fall into certain terrestrial bounds.

NBC did however have a very odd deal with local cable distributors that either cut certain viewers out, or at least made them be dishonest in order to watch coverage. When first logging into the video area, viewers must provide a zip code and local NBC cable affiliate. Certain local cable operators did not make deals with NBC for online coverage (which of course includes the exchange of some $), so if you picked the wrong provider, you got an apology and no video. Of course, everyone immediately notes that you merely have to go back and lie about your service provider in order to by pass this step. How annoying…

And speaking of annoying—there are time delays; NBC has been heavily criticized for delaying west coast coverage to fit into the prime time slots. NBC is trying to insert its control of the information and entertainment that is the Olympics and trying to wedge it into its standard broadcast cycle. This just doesn’t work in a global and wired community. I have gotten a great deal of breaking Olympics news from friends on Twitter who are more interested in the games than I am. Their comments and notes have pulled me into seeing more than I ever would have, if left to my own devices. Time delayed “live feeds” for the west coast was a poor decision and they should have gone with truly live feeds, then followed up with somehow deeper coverage in the time slots they have picked for prime time. Delaying the Opening Ceremonies an entire 12 hours to fit the schedule, while making some logistical sense, was extremely annoying.

One last troublesome part of the online coverage has been the lack of commentary. Viewers online are truly not getting the same viewing experience as their TV brethren as they are missing the commentary coverage, which for some sports is more crucial to being able to follow the action. This was most likely less a decision that was actually made so much as a fact of how the broadcasts are being engineered. From my understanding of reading the various comments in the articles published on these Olympics so far, the streams are originating live from China, while the NBC broadcasts we see on TV are piped back to NYC where the commentary is married to the feed. Having the separation probably meant it was all but impossible to ever get a sync for the live streams being generated. That said, it’s still lame that there isn’t an option to view with or without commentary. This is the frigging Internet, people! We want our video served like our burgers – with all of the toppings on it. I want all the options, all the bells and whistles, and I want to pick and choose which ones are on and off. In the next Olympics, I would like to have all of the commentary options, and I want to actually select which commentators I selectively listen to.

Lack of Interest or System Blocking

There was one last area that received some commentary and coverage regarding why viewers weren’t getting their coverage online and this was entirely out of the control of NBC, the Olympics, Silverlight, Microsoft, and anybody else who has been blamed or lauded for the experience. Some employers will simply stop people from being able to view online video from work, either due to fears of productivity drain or just fear of crippling the network, by blocking the ports needed to access the content. It’s a shame companies would lock out their own employees. There are myriad reasons why it could be a logistical nightmare for IT to deal with, so I can’t ultimately be too damning about this. I believe it would be better to leave it open and request that viewing be self policed and minimized. The second reason is that there are simply people who prefer to watch the Olympics in their living room instead of Online. I’m fairly certain Mark Cuban is one of those guys and I suppose if I had a 73″ TV, I’d be watching lots of stuff on it as well. I still for the life of me can’t understand why people, whether outspoken billionaires or broadcasters, insist on taking this either/or stance with viewership. Some people want to watch it online, some want to watch it on TV, why can’t we have both? I do have both and I use both. Given how much I travel, there are shows that I watch on a mixture of laptops, iPods, and televisions and it’s frustrating to hear someone call that experience invalid. Given how many people watch streaming Olympic content, whether legally or not, it sounds to me that maybe online viewership is perfectly valid.

What the Numbers Say

So while the commentary has called the online viewing experience a mixed bag, I’m fairly certain NBC sees it as a win when they see these numbers:

• 70 million page views are nearly 50 million more page views than the peak day in Athens (Day 4, 20.6 million).
• NBCOlympics.com’s 4.2 million unique users show an increase of 496 percent over the unique users for the opening day of the Athens Games in 2004 (705,000).
• Since August 1, 2008, NBCOlympics.com has accumulated more than 127 million page views, nearly half the total for the entire Athens Games.
• 31 million unique visitors; 6.5 million daily uniques.
• Users spend approximately 13 minutes per visit.
• The site is still showing sequential growth, with Aug. 15 up 21 percent in page views, 8 percent in uniques and 57 percent in video streams over Aug. 14. That very well could shift, though, with swimming aka The Michael Phelps Story coming to an end Saturday night.
• Meanwhile, eight days in, NBC says it has reached 185 million viewers, more than the total for Torino, Nagano or Albertville.

I sincerely hope they do not view the numbers they are seeing as an indication of their success in implanting the content. Instead – and this is an important distinction – it is, I believe, a reflection in the number of people moving their viewership online, even if the experience of retrieving the content is lacking.

Reality Check

After all that, let’s take a deep breath and do a reality check. Even though we’re collectively less than happy with the Olympics video online, it’s still a step forward from the previous summer Olympics.

Consider that at the Athens 2004 games—less content was available, none of it was live, and thanks to a deal with Visa, ONLY a card holder could actually access the video. In 2006, Dick Ebersol was even quoted as saying they were confident they’d be able to do 1000 hours of content for the 08 Olympics. Two years later and they are delivering up more than twice that figure, which is also twice as much broadcast coverage. So is the experience ideal? No. Is it better than previous online solutions? Yes, wholeheartedly. Does this mean NBC has to do even better the NEXT Olympics? Ab-so-freaking-lutely.