Digital Rapids Interview - Encoding the Olympics [17:47m]: Download

When the first games began a week ago at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, NBC launched their extensive coverage of the games on a handful of NBC Universal networks as well as at NBCOlympics.com. The site offers an unprecedented amount of live and archived video content…when the games wrap in a few weeks, they will have an archive of over 2000 hours of Olympics video. In the first 3 days alone they reported 17.7 million video streams served.

We spoke with Mike Nann of Digital Rapids, the company tasked with encoding the video feeds which ultimately end up streaming from NBCOlympics.com. Digital Rapids is one essential link in the video coverage chain…they take the source feeds from 100+ cameras coming in from multiple venues day and night, filter and compress them on the fly, and send every single stream (at multiple resolutions and bitrates) across the Pacific Ocean on Limelight Network’s CDN. Those feeds are then either streamed live from the NBC site, or archived for users to play on demand. Did I mention this was happening LIVE? This podcast interview is my discussion with Mike about how they are accomplishing this massive task.

Download via the attached link, or subscribe to the iTunes podcast feed.

Image by Kathy Zhuang, Creative Commons licensed with attribution.