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The Olympic Live Stream: Observations, Recommendations, Predictions
lpress writes "The Tour de France and the Olympics were live streamed on the Web. The BBC streamed 2,500 hours of live coverage of the Olympics and NBC streamed the entire Tour de France and 302 events from all 32 Olympic sports. I watched both events as a fan and as an observer of the online content and the network performance. I blogged detailed descriptions of my experience and summarized it in 12 observations and recommendations. The summary concludes with predictions about the way live events will be covered in the future — coverage of these events was an early step in a major shakeup of the way live events are produced, distributed and viewed."
I found NBC's coverage to be pretty awesome. I didn't have to watch regionally-popular sports that aren't interesting to me (an American), and basically got to watch America soundly defeat the world in the medal race.
America! Fuck Yeah!
I wanted to stream part of the Olympics, but NBC wouldn't take my money! They demanded that I pay Comcast $65 or more to have "free" access to the streaming. I am a comcast subscriber, but not at that level.
They wouldn't let me pay to stream ... so I found .... "other alternatives."
Damn you NBC! Offer a way to pay $10-$20 to stream the content for non-cable subscribers - please.
BTW, Calling Comcast on Monday to completely drop CATV service. OTA/ATSC provides more channels here than the $30/month plan.
I was going to go in for: the Olympics, and by extension their television coverage, are going to become ever-more-commercialized bullshit that will eventually become completely unwatchable. But perhaps this alternate vision will come true instead.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I tried viewing the streaming (and recorded) coverage using both Windows and Linux versions of Firefox and both exhibited a memory leak of some kind that made them fail miserably after about ten minutes.
Live coverage of 100 mile cycling events is tough logistics.
The cameraman rides on the back of a motorcycle. The signal beams from his camera to a hovering helicopter, and then to a satellite.
It's very impressive that they can get and maintain quality streams under these circumstances. Well trained people and excellent equipment all around.
The 60+ mph downhill runs must also be a crazy experience for the motorcycle driver, with a passenger on the back.
Being a license fee payer, this years olympic coverage from the BBC was actually good enough for me to consider the license fee to be 100% justified. The lack of ads alone was awesome.
The debate about the license fee tends to rage back and forth on a regular basis over here. We genuinely do get a metric ton of generally good quality tv, ad-free and with free streaming. And a lot of tat too. Although it's interesting to note that the UK really came late to the Pay-per-view party. Convincing people that paid a license fee/monthly fee for their cable or sat package that they have to pay again? The main selling points they used over here were the "when you want" nature of the beast, for movies and such, and for sporting events, likening it to buying a ticket. They worked very hard not to remind people that you'd already paid them for the priviledge.
Guess I'll always sneakily love the BBC as being one of the last holdouts against the paywalling of culture, or the slow posioning of it by 1000 ads for things I never knew I could be irritated by.
"How fine you look when dressed in rage."
The Olympics should either have their own coverage and stream that and let me pay them to stream it for the 2 weeks,
Or whoever pays them for distribution rights should do this.
I'm not going to waste my time trying to get streaming working at a reasonable rate through a proxy,
and neither am I going to pay a company that doesn't provide service in my area just to watch 2 weeks of Olympics.
There was of course local coverage, but they only really covered the events that we had contestants in.
It also wasn't live streaming, so I could just as easily get it from the piratebay with better coverage.
I live in Hawaii and am an avid cyclist and love to follow Le Tour. A typical TdF stage beings in the middle of my night and ends just as I get up. To watch an entire stage every day (21 stages) would consume too much of my time, at any time. I record the long (3 hrs) NBC show daily on my TiVo and watch that when I get home after work. Sometimes I just watch the shorter highlights show, which has more sidebars.
In general, while more live coverage is a good thing, content providers should continue to develop time shifting options (see also Hulu - TV) and offer insightful commentary and back story items.
Gary Dunn
Open Slate Project
I set up two high spec PCs to record the entire Olympics from 24 HD satellite channels (and some terrestrial SD/HD channels too). No need for a Net connection and I have 15TB of recordings to sift through (edits, deletes etc) at my leisure. It should be noted that the HD TV broadcasts were around 10-11 Mbits/sec, which is approximately twice the rate of the HD Net streams the BBC have up on their site.
The 24 satellite/cable HD channels (free apart from the TV licence fee of course - and no ads!) were by far the best thing w.r.t. the BBC broadcasts, IMHO. I could list quite a few annoyances with the terrestrial coverage ranging from ludicrous studio yabbering whilst actual live sports were visibly/audibly going on behind the presenters (cycling, swimming and athletics were the worst offenders), failure to air Jason Kenny's cycling gold medal win and medal ceremony on terrestrial HD and a surprisingly weak Olympics Tonight highlights show that often failed to air sub-5-minute events in full (colorised, edited out, blaring background music and hardly any of the original comms).
I think what worries me about Rio 2016 is that the UK won't see the equivalent of the 24 HD channels from the BBC again (hopefully via both satellite and cable like London 2012). It might mean that London 2012 will remain the largest TV event in the UK for quite some time to come.
The Comcast cable service my wife has us subscribe to for other content gave me access, so can't fuss about that. The NBC site prompted me for my cable provider the first time I tried to view a stream, and apparently got all the info they needed from my IP address. After the first access everything was transparent. The listing of when the live streaming of the (fencing) events I was interested in was accurate. Streams started promptly and played smoothly. Even for modest sized content (480p rather than high-def), decoding was compute-intensive, requiring the cycles from about 1.5 of the two processor cores on my Mac. That seemed excessive.
I'm a sport fencer. Epee if it matters. I wanted to watch the later rounds of the various epee events -- men's individual, women's individual, women's team. No men's team epee event at the Olympics this year, as the IOC has limited the number of fencing gold medals that can be won. None of the epee events were on US television, only available by streaming. Every minute of all the events were available, at least on replay. Except for one, the live events were either too early, or conflicted with the rest of my life. What was available in replay was the nearly raw video feed from the venue. The action, then a quick slow-motion replay of each touch. The director(s) obviously knew something about the sport, since the slow motion was generally the correct one of the two or three options for camera angle. Audio was the microphone for the referee of the bout being shown, plus ambient noise from the venue (including the PA). No announcer. No color analyst. No commercials. When the Koreans appealed the referee's decision and there was an hour of dead time from the venue, every minute of the dead time was included in the stream. As an aside for those who saw pictures of the Korean woman sitting on the strip, it wasn't a "protest" -- international fencing rules require the fencer to stay at the strip until the appeal is settled.
For an epeeist, that's really terrific coverage. I know what I'm looking for, and the announcer/color commentary are just a distraction. For a non-fencer, it must have been terrible.
For me the lack of commentary (or in some cases the inclusion of feed commentators who weren't as biased as NBC's) was one of the best things about the streaming.
Depends. If there is a contest on which check-out operator can check out the most number of items in 10 minutes, count me in.
For some events, such as Tennis, the (BBC) live streams without commentary were more enjoyable than those with commentary. On the commentary-less feeds, you could clearly hear the umpire, line judges and the crowd. When there was commentary, the sound level from the court was reduced below that of the commentary. Added to that, much of the commentary consisted of the commentators inane chatter amongst themselves about what the players had done in the past. This actually detracted from the enjoyment of the event.
Are you sure it was 15 megabits? That's better than most HD TV broadcasts, f it was H.264. it would give most CPUs a serious workout.
Some commentators are OK, some are dire for the sports. The nadir, the very worst, is Mark Lawrenson (football, or soccer for the former colonists) - just unspeakably bad and has never said anything of note or interest during any football game (he does more than the Olympics, so his uselessness is of vast scope).
The one I really don't get is the commentary opening and closing ceremonies. Why on earth do they think the artistic part of the ceremony needs commentary at all? Some idiot warbling "Here's Kenneth Branaugh giving Caliban's speech from the tempest" over Caliban's speech from The Tempest. Why? Do they feel the need to interject things like "Oh course, Jason Bourne is played by Matt Damon, whose first film role was in Mystic Pizza" during a tense chase sequence in the film?
I can just about (if I were being charitable) see the point of a bit of background for the more ceremonial parts of the event - flag carriers and that sort of thing. But even there - the crowd in the stadium get by perfectly well on the stadium announcers, so just be quiet.
And breathe
The first week, about 80% of my Olympics viewing was through the streaming. Not only was it live, but I got to watch events that would never get covered (or get more than 10 minutes of tv time several hours later). And I do applaud NBC for streaming every single event live. At least they got something right.
I usually preferred watching without commentary. It was nice not getting my ear talked off the whole time. It was also very nice that commentary could be turned off (and back on when I did want it) for those events with it.
Of course, AT&T throttled me the second week because god forbid I actually use my unlimited data plan through an app on a device they sell. So I pretty much couldn't stream during the weekday. But I definitely would have, otherwise.
Their website and app needed A LOT of work. Not very friendly at all, and it would take forever for the links to ended events to be removed.
I saw almost all of my olympics on this site, http://www.eurovisionsports.tv/london2012/ (obviously not really active now)
Not the greatest quality, but it was legal, and free, and you simply got the basic feed that Eurovision sent to TV channels around the world, so no commentators or anything, it was just pure Olympics, and you could watch an event from start to finish if you'd like.
I would gladly have paid good money for an HD version, but it was simply not possible to pay for better service.
I hope that Rio does something like this, and then just takes it a step further.