The Keynote Benchmark - The Mobile and Internet Performance Review

Technology history was made at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing and Keynote played a role in making it happen. With the unprecedented use of streaming video to inform the US and the world in real time, this year’s games received coverage like never before, and those Web sites that invested upfront in load testing and monitoring performed extraordinarily well given their aggressive complexity, and the extreme popularity of the Web 2.0 enabled sites.

The Web-based Olympic coverage was expected to be a watershed for online content. NBC covered the Olympics for the US market like never before. Earlier this year, NBC announced it would be using Microsoft’s Silverlight to provide complementary web coverage for its broadcast of the event. In all, the ambitious NBCOlympics.com planned to deliver, over the 17 days of the Olympics, 2,200 hours of live event video coverage and more than 3,000 hours of on-demand video content including full-event replays, highlights, features, interviews and encore packages. At peak times there may have been more that 20 simultaneous live video streams. In fact, the Olympics content is still available for viewing at the site, including highlights and montages.

NBC was not the only entity that used the Web to provide streaming video focused on the Olympics. The NewsMarket provided video clips, prepared by Olympics sponsors and organizations such as Adidas, Visa, Samsung, Volkswagen, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC), free to news organizations throughout the world. The organization launched a Beijing 2008 channel in April and supplied material for more than 350 news organizations starting in July. Both content and demand were expected to grow exponentially as the Olympics approached, and continue as it played out.

In an article by Bill Greenwood datelined July 24 on streamingmedia.com, he quoted NewsMarket president, CEO, and co-founder Shoba Purushothaman, “There’s a lot riding in the video world around these Olympics,” she said. “The power of video, I think, is really going to come into its own after this Olympics. As a business model, I think we will be taking one giant step forward.”

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