Shownotes:
A GeekBrief.TV viewer who traveled to China told me Geek Brief is banned there. I don’t know if that’s still true, but I’ve decided the Olympics being in Bejing is more of a good thing than a bad thing because the world is paying attention to Chinese restrictions of freedom. I also don’t want to miss the girl’s gymnastic competition.
This Brief is an interview with Mike Nann from Digital-Rapids.com. Digital Rapids is providing the streaming technology to NBC that will make live coverage of multiple Olympic games possible to an extent we’ve never seen before. Here’s a quote from the Digital Rapids press release:
“Digital Rapids’ DRC-Stream encoding and streaming solutions will enable NBC Olympics’ unprecedented live and on-demand online coverage of the Beijing Olympics. 2200 hours of video will be streamed live on the Internet at NBCOlympics.com, primarily encoded from video feeds into web-friendly streams through the DRC-Stream systems. Streams will be encoded in the VC-1 compression format for a viewing experience powered by Microsoft Silverlight technology. The encoded live streams will also be archived for viewers to watch on-demand. Digital Rapids Transcode Manager, the enterprise-class solution for scalable, high-volume media file transcoding, will be used to convert affiliate-provided content between compression and file formats for U.S. domestic distribution.”
UPDATE: Mike Nann’s name is misspelled in the lower thirds. My apologies to Mike! I told Neal how to spell Mike’s name when Neal was doing the graphics, and he made the common mistake of hearing “M” not “N”. I should have double checked.
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August 8th, 2008 at 2:37 am
Do it Live Cali! Do it Live!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5qU4qudJYk
August 8th, 2008 at 4:57 am
Great show, and very timely! I only have basic cable so I wasn’t going to have all the nbc “tv” outlets and was planning to do most of my watching via internet.
Also. Loved the handheld(?) camera work and shot angles. Adds a nice dimension. I recommend keeping it up :-)
Robert
August 8th, 2008 at 5:34 am
I’m really frustrated by the fact that NBC’s video coverage is only available in the US – especially as I installed Siverlight for the sole reason of watching this content.
This shouldn’t still be happening, and it’s really irritating. The web is a global property.
August 8th, 2008 at 5:49 am
turned off at the first mention of “olympics”
August 8th, 2008 at 7:08 am
Now, I just hope it works on my Mac. I’ve never been able to get NBC on-demand content to play, even after downloading, installing, etc. *sigh* Thus I don’t have high hopes.
August 8th, 2008 at 8:11 am
Yeah, I was really excited about being able to watch the Olympics since I don’t have TV…I can’t even pick up an over-the-air signal. But once I got to the site, I saw it was in Silverlight. Crap…Microsoft doesn’t make silverlight for Linux, and the Free implementation by the Mono/SuSE guys isn’t quite ready yet (or at maybe it’s blocked by NBC?).
Either way, NBC won’t be getting ANY of my ad revenue or support, since it’s REALLY not worth my time to boot into a Windows machine just to watch a few events.
Really disappointing, esp. since the guy Cali just had on says we won’t be able to tell a difference between Silverlight and Flash. I would be a lot happier if Silverlight was actually better, but now…
:’(
August 8th, 2008 at 8:26 am
ahh… Alex, I think I will complain about the disadvantage of US view, bbc on demand and the FIA live world feed are free internet stream exclusive for Europe; and that is for LIFE, us US view only having our amateur taste of net TV live streaming for an event, well a big one I agree, but shouldn’t we catch up and get more international tv feed into the US everyday?
August 8th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Silverlight? What a bummer, I would love to stream the Olympics, but I won’t be installing anything from Microsoft anytime soon, esp. this bloatware.
Mike’s comments comparing Silverlight to Adobe Acrobat are not relevant, since they aren’t the same kind of software and no one cares about size. It’s likely that Microsoft is funding this operation; a massive distribution opportunity.
I commend your technical achievements, but I’m sticking with Flash.
ironically loading this page produced a flash error: Error #2044: Unhandled IOErrorEvent:. text=Error #2035: URL Not Found. (I think it’s coming from your amazon widget, cheers!)
August 8th, 2008 at 10:02 am
I agree with fluffman, you can’t watch the videos on nbcolypics.com if you are running Linux.
The Comment by Mike Nann that that it doesn’t matter if video is in flash or silverlight really angered me, does he consider that Linux used don’t matter? we are customers too,…
August 8th, 2008 at 10:21 am
Great episode Cali, I’ve been really interested in the technology powering this and how it was going to work, so this was right up my alley! Just installed silverlight, ooking forward to watching the games.
btw, @fluffman86, not worth your time to boot into windows? You’d rather choose to not participate with the rest of world just to make a point about what is the cooler OS? That’s fine I guess, clears up the stream for the rest of us!
August 8th, 2008 at 10:29 am
Yay, it’s actually working for me! :)
August 8th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Just watched this Brief on my Apple TV, and am typing this comment on my iPhone — I love tech.
This was a great one. I really enjoyed hearing about everything that’s gone into NBC’s plan for Internet coverage of the Olympics. I love everything you do on the Brief, but I think I’m growing to love the interviews most of all.
August 8th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Hey Cali, very cool episode! Streaks ahead of that ‘augmented reality’ hoax video you had on episode 405. You know, the one with the unspecial effects.
So yes, very cool episode :o)
PS you need to fire the lighting guy! (tv nearly turned into an angel, did you not spot the light shining on it?)
PPS you did nothing wrong!
August 8th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Cali,
I’m so happy that NBC is posting this content for millions of people, the sad part, Canadians are not part of this. It is very frustrating to be told, “you can watch it online”, and then to find out, content is blocked out for Canadians. I’m sure this wasn’t NBCs decision, but seriously, this is really starting to **** me off!
August 9th, 2008 at 5:43 am
Cali,
As these shows have a global audience I think that it should have been mentioned that this is only available in the US. I’m not into the Olympics, but I’m into technology. So, when I heard this show I went to the NBC site, downloaded Silverlight and ….. nothing, because I’m not in the US!
August 9th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Adobe is available on multiple platforms and Silverlight isn’t, so there is no comparison. Also the downloading the video for local play only works if you are running Windows Vista. Ughh! This is no way to provide this video.
August 10th, 2008 at 1:11 am
Sadly NBCOlympics.com only works on Intel Macs. My PowerPC Mac and I are out of luck. That just isn’t cool.
August 10th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
@warplayer
The point here is that there are a lot of devices that have a flash plugin that don’t come with either Windows or OSX. The Wii, the EEEPC or my MSI Wind (SUSE version) are good exemples. I don’t have the number for the US, but last month in the UK 2.5% of the computers sold had Linux preinstalled.
What is infuriating is that not so much that NBC leaves these peoples without a stream, but that the person responsible for it does consider that there is no problem. The feeling I had was that for this guy I didn’t matter as a customer, and that’s a very bad feeling. If he believes that the web stops at Windows and OSX he’s wrong.
August 10th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
@Erlik:
That’s exactly how I feel. You put things into words a lot better than I did, though. :)
@warplayer:
It’s not (just) about “proving a point” or about “Linux being cooler” (although it is cooler :P ). It’s about convenience and ability. Most TV shows can be streamed from the broadcaster’s website, or downloaded by torrent, or watched over the air, or watched on cable. Cable TV here is $50/month (too much); I live in woods under a tin roof, so over-the-air doesn’t work; torrents take a while to be posted, and may not be what I want anyway; so in this scenario all that leaves is watching online.
I could watch on Youtube, but that’s blocked because I’m in the USA. (Proxies *could* work, but they are slow and won’t be the same content that I could get from NBC so I could discuss the happenings with family.) That ONLY leaves nbcolympics.com or watching over at a friend’s house. Both of these are equally inconvenient, except if NBC would let me watch on the site at least they’d be making some ad revenue (nobody I know participates in the Nielson Ratings).
Even if booting into Windows wasn’t a big deal, the fact remains that silverlight is supposed to be a “cross-platform, open alternative to Adobe Flash.” This is an outright lie! Sure, it works on OS X and XP and Vista, but ONLY on x86 based processors. Something that’s cross platform would compile with ANY OS *or* processor combination.
Silverlight can’t be compared to SWF or PDF, as both of those formats have been opened by Adobe for implementation by any other program…meaning there are alternatives to Flash and Reader…which are available on most platforms ANYWAY.
Again, this wouldn’t be that big of a deal if it offered some amazing new features over flash, but it’s simply RUDE to use something new that doesn’t work for everyone when “the user won’t notice a difference between this and flash,”
August 10th, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Hmmm. Flash works on my G5, and this doesn’t. Guess that means they’re not the same, is it? Your guest says it’s all about the user experience. Well, mine is pretty lousy since it won’t work at all.
August 11th, 2008 at 5:58 am
I too am disappointed about the Flash/Silverlight issue. But more disappointed that Cali did not mention this. No they are not the same. If they were, then why not just use the one that everyone already has installed and working?
It is not just a matter of OS choice and making a point. If you work in any one OS and have to completely close your machine and work down just to watch an event and then get back to work, that gets frustrating.
I live outside the US so none of this works for me. I have been using a proxy server and watching on the BBC. May not be as full featured as the NBC streams, but I can at least watch it in Linux.
August 20th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
What about the fact that if you have a dual or quad G5, Silverlight just wont work at all. If it’s just the wrapper to play the video, why not pick a proven (non beta) product that is truly cross platform like Flash?
December 24th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
I guess I’m gonna need to read up some more but this is a pretty good place to start.