[ Music ] ^M00:00:02
>> I think, you know, for true sports fans this is a
pretty good thing.
>> Sure is. If you missed that gold medal relay race,
or want to watch that volleyball spike again and again.
>> For the real die-hard junkies, you can watch up to
four events at once.
>> And these 2008 summer games, Microsoft, in charge of
running nbcolympics.com passed over Adobe's Flash to use
its own home-grown software, Silverlight, to deliver
video over the web.
>> It works on the Intel Macs, it works on Windows.
It's a competitor to Flash, so Microsoft is using this,
really, as a coming out party for Silverlight.
>> How exactly does the sport get transmitted from the
actual event or field or stadium all the way to my
computer?
>> That live feed goes all the way from the stadium to
what's known as the International Broadcasting Center in
Beijing. Then it gets sent via satellite to NBC
facilities in New York. From there they actually add a
little bit of delay, so live bloggers can add
commentary, and then it gets sent out to a content
delivery network that helps make sure it gets
efficiently to your Internet service provider, and
ultimately to you.
>> If you didn't get to see it live it now shows up in
the video list as something that is available for
rewind. There's highlights and encore content, which is
basically content that was produced for television. We
then run that through a similar encoding process for
rewind, and then that gets pushed out to the site.
>> Judging by the numbers, millions of people are tuning
in -- or -- logging on.
>> Five million viewers, 22 to 25 million streams in
just the first five days.
>> And the other bit of good news for NBC.
>> Most of the people who are watching on the web are
still watching on TV. At least from what we're hearing
anecdotally.
>> I'm only interested in a few events, as well. You
know, I guess I don't need -- I don't need TV to watch
every single thing. So I just watch the swimming and
gymnastics mostly -- tennis -- is all.
>> So you would prefer TV, but computer is a good
backup?
>> For the time being, absolutely. Because I'm not
going to -- nobody is going to let me a television on my
desk any time soon.
>> A lot of my friends do watch it, and they like the
fact that there's no sports announcer. So you'll, for
example, in basketball you can hear the squeaking
sounds, and it actually makes you feel more like you're
right there.
>> Besides complaints about the streaming quality, there
are still some imperfections.
>> The only pet peeve I've had is sometimes the
commentary has been a few seconds ahead of the action,
which is no fun to read about it before you see it.
>> And don't expect to watch the marque events live.
>> Comparing the first week of these games to the entire
Athens games, the video interest online has exploded.
In fact, the number of video streams in these five days
alone is up 812% to four years ago. I am Carla De Bois,
cnet.com.
^M00:02:41
[ Music ]
