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.