Video Processing Perspectives

It's been a long, but worthwhile, wait since the last Olympic Winter Games.
I think this year is especially exciting due to how far we've come technologically in just the last four years, let alone since I was a kid.

I remember bending rabbit ears on my 7" TV, picking up a fuzzy CTV Broadcast of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary.  Being a young hockey player and skier, I was addicted to the Winter Olympics from that moment on, and I've watched every Olympics since. 

The evolution of media delivery and consumption over that period is really remarkable, and the Vancouver games will bring more options than ever for tuning in. In the US, NBC has gone to an all-HD production for the first time.  They will be broadcasting 835 hours of content on their network.  In addition, they will be live streaming about half of that over the Internet, and providing video-on-demand replays of over 1,000 hours of events. NBC is teaming up with Microsoft to present the online streams using Smooth Streaming technology and Silverlight players, which presents an amazing step forward in video quality.

Smooth Streaming dramatically improves the user's experience of watching a live event online.  Instead of the dreaded "Buffering..." message that video players might show right before the photo-finish of the 1000m speed skating race, Smooth Streaming allows the player to switch to a lower bit rate video stream when there isn't enough bandwidth available to keep up with the live event. 

The user experience of live video on the web is finally reaching the reliability and quality of Broadcast TV, but at a heavy cost to the content producer; every one of those 1,000 hours of content must be encoded at six different bitrates as they are ingested.  The current solution for scaling up to events this large is to add more servers, however this is only an option for high-profile events like the Olympics. 

Elemental is changing the economics of adaptive bit rate streaming by packing more encoding density in a single server leveraging GPUs to do the heavy lifting.  By supporting Microsoft Smooth Streaming (and other adaptive bit rate technologies from Adobe and Apple) in a single unit, our products empower content owners to give their users the same experience that NBC and their partners will be providing us from Vancouver.

As good as the user experience will be watching the Games streamed on the web this year, there is nothing quite like being there live.  While I'll be watching the opening ceremony tonight from home, Elemental headquarters happens to be just a short trip up I-5 to Vancouver, so I will be unplugging from the Internet to go cheer on Team USA.  See you in Vancouver!

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