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NBC Has a “Template” To Fight Online Piracy

Justin Kerr — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 09:02:56 -0500

NBC has lost many battles over the past few years, but it looks as though it might actually win the war over its copy protected media. Executives from the company claim to have found a “template” for protecting their videos from piracy, and it appears as though it’s actually working. You may have noticed lately that copy protected content from NBC and others have been slowly drying up from video swapping sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Veoh and even Soapbox. And as a result, NBC has been very vocal about the fact that it is generally satisfied with the new systems these services have put in place. As proof NBC cites its recent successes in controlling content from the both the Olympic Games and select Saturday Night Live clips. Clearly NBC views YouTube and other similar services as the primary battleground in protecting their content and attributes a large percentage of online video piracy to being committed out of convenience. According to Rick Cotton NBC’s general council; "What has happened up to now is the ability to access and download infringing content has been trivially simple, and the lesson it teaches people is that if it's that easy it can't be wrong,". NBC however seems to recognize that it needs to find alternatives to these services or risk pushing users to harder forms of piracy such as Bit Torrent. Arguably its full length episodes at both nbc.com and hulu.com do just that. Only time will tell if NBC’s main beef was truly over controlling its content, or simply locking it down to traditional distribution models.

Does the end of copy protected media on sites like YouTube put the death nail in user submitted video? Let us know what you think.

(Image Credit: www.nbc.com)

NBC Dumps Silverlight After the Olympics, Runs Back to Flash

Paul Lilly — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:46:01 -0500

NBC's fling with Microsoft's Silverlight platform appears to be over, at least for the time being. NBC had previously agreed to stream the Beijing Olympics to viewers using Silverlight instead of Flash to deliver the content, but now that the Olympics have wrapped up, NBC has turned back to Flash for this week's NFL season opener.

Even still, the short-term relationship can be viewed as a success for Microsoft, who managed to increase its install-base through the apparently time limited partnership. Overall download specifics were never disclosed, but we do know that at one point 1.5 million downloads were being registered per day, and according to a spokeswoman for Microsoft, at one point "more than 50 percent of the visitors to NBCOlympics.com on MSN already [had] Silverlight 2 installed." Having a large install base is important because it makes it easier for Microsoft to convince developers to use its platform.

And for Adobe, it means getting back a major partner, but not without a downside. While viewers were able to watch NFL games with Flash installed, reports have surfaced complaining of unwatchable video quality saddled with freeze frames, blurry action, and skipping back and forth while as the feeds tried to buffer.

NBC Earned 1.2 Billion Pageviews from Olympics Coverage

Paul Lilly — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:00:54 -0500

Sometimes you have to roll the dice if you're to have a shot at a big payout, and that's exactly what NBC did when it scheduled no less than 2,200 hours of live streaming coverage to be available free of charge on its website. Without enough viewers tuning to turn those pageviews into advertising dollars, the decision could have turned into an epic fail for NBC. Instead, the broadcasting company was able to cash in on the virtual gold.

As of Saturday, NBC reported it had received a staggering 1.2 billion pageviews resulting in an equally impressive 72 million video stream views. Those numbers represent more than the totals for the 2004 and 2006 Games combined.

But NBC wasn't the only big winner in this years' Olympics. According to research firm Nielsen Online, search engine and news aggregation Yahoo was getting 4.7 million unique visitors a day at the Olympics' peak. AOL, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, the Beijing Organizing Committee, The New York Times, and USA Today also saw heavily increased traffic.

Image Credit: NBCOlympics.com

The Big Loser in This Year's Olympics: Adobe

Paul Lilly — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:33:11 -0500

It might not be well publicized, but there's a major war brewing between Microsoft and Adobe, and they're fighting for you. Each one of them wants to be your provider for rich media content, a task that has traditionally been served by Adobe with its Flash player, but one Olympic sized loss could change the game in Microsoft's favor.

It was Microsoft who won the deal to supply NBC with video-viewing technology via Silverlight for the Olympics in Beijing, and while Microsoft and NBC have ties that go back to their collaboration building MSNBC, Adobe could have been considered a favorite to the win the account based the mature nature of Flash technology. So how did Microsoft secure the gold?

"We talked about features like adaptive streaming, the ability to automatically keep checking how much bandwidth you have and deliver the appropriate quality stream and how to be smart about knowing what's coming up in the stream," said Rob Bennett, the general manager of sports for MSN.

In other words, Microsoft won the account on a combination of Silverlight's feature-set, and convincing NBC that Flash's scalability had never been put to an Olympic-size test, unlike Silverlight's underlying technology which is based on Windows Media technologies.

Of course, it's only one account, but it's not so much what Adobe lost, but what Microsoft gained. While download specifics have not been disclosed, we do know that it's registering 1.5 million downloads a day, and according to a spokeswoman for Microsoft, "in the last several days, more than 50 percent of the visitors to NBCOlympics.com on MSN already have Silverlight 2 installed."

NBC Breaks Records, Develops New Methods for Beijing Olympics Coverage

Mark Edward Soper — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:41:14 -0500

eWeek reports that NBC will provide 2,900 hours of live TV coverage, shattering the 2,562 hours of combined US TV coverage for all previous summer Olympics games. According to NBCOlympics.com, though, the number is even higher (3,600 hours) when all NBC Universal networks and NBCOlympics.com are taken into account.

What's even more interesting, though, is how NBC will do it. They'll be shooting half of the coverage in HD (they'll need 11TB of storage just for that) and the remainder in standard format (6TB).

Who's Storing It for NBC?

Isilon Systems and Omneon Video Networks are providing the hardware and software needed for the storage data centers NBC will use for this unprecedented level of coverage.

World, Meet Proxy-Based Workflow

To enable NBC to cope with thousands of hours of coverage, NBC and its technology partners have devised a concept called proxy-based workflow. Instead of sending full-quality HD streams from Beijing, the editing process uses lower-quality MPEG-4 streams as a proxy for HD.

Covering the PC and Device World

As you've already learned in our previous coverage, TV Tonic will deliver Vista users with Windows Media Center up to HD Internet TV via TVTonic and will provide Silverlight-based streaming video for other operating systems and browsers. NBC will also provide main event highlights for mobile devices as well.

For all NBC TV, computer, and mobile device coverage of the Beijing Summer Olympics, go to NBCOlympics.com.

No BS Podcast #9

Maximum PC Staff — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 14:55:43 -0500

Welcome to the Will-free, partying-in-the-labs-all-day edition of the Maximum PC Podcast (w00t)! This week, Gordon, Mike, Katherine, Tom, and Jeremy discuss:

Shutdown Day!
ATI's R600 videocard
Good news about Windows security
NBC and News Corp's new video-streaming site
Hitachi's terabyte desktop hard drive

All that, plus a live update from the Maximum PC Lab, reader questions, and Gordon's Rant of the Week, in the Maximum PC Podcast!

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