NBC Aims For Stability Through Redundancy In Athens

Darren writes "With the Athens Olympics just 27 days away NBC is gearing up for a massive 1210 hours of coverage (that's enough to watch TV over 50 days of Olympics 24/7). The infrastructure needed to provide such coverage is huge, and the potential for problems is significant. As a result NBC are taking all precautions possible and over the 17 days of competition they will utilize three satellite network linkups and three land-based connections to ensure they always have a connection. The mind boggles at what it is all going to cost - but I'm sure their advertising revenue will make it worth their while."

Hang on...

[Anonymous Coward]

The infrastructure needed to provide such coverage is huge and the potential for problems is significant.

Unlike the facilities for the Olympics themselves, the place is still a building site isn't it?

Why the indirect linkage via a blog?

[poulbailey]

This story just seems to be posted to drive traffic to a blog. Why do the Slashdot editors allow this?

The proper stories are posted at sportsillustrated.cnn.com [cnn.com] (printer friendly [clickability.com]) and computerworld.com [computerworld.com] (printer friendly [computerworld.com]) respectively. Click those links instead.

Why does NBC bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite spending so much time & effort covering the games, they don't actually broadcast the vast majority of it!

NBC will have a couple hours of wrapup every day, and that will be it.

So what? The coverage will suck anyway

[sjbe]

The major network coverage of the Olympics stinks anyway. Endless fluff pieces about athletes, almost no coverage of anyone who is not from the US, and heaven forbid they spend time on anything but track, volleyball, swimming, diving and gymnastics (again especially if no americans figure for a gold) and tape delayed coverage. Last olympics I was lucky enough to have CBC coverage since I lived near Canada but no such luck now. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the sports that do get the airtime but the coverage is usually horrible for anyone who actually knows/cares about a given sport.

For example, the bicyling time trial last time was "The Lance Armstrong Show". I don't have anything against Lance but he didn't even win and there were lots of other good riders I would have liked to see. What little coverage was shown was poor and basically an expose about Lance's life. I wanted to see the event. If I wanted information about a rider there are plenty of ways to find out. (Yes I know why they do this but I don't have to like it)

Anyway I seriously doubt I'll be watching much of the Olympics. The coverage will be annoying and instead of seeing a variety of sports I'll be subjected to every qualifying round of the men's volleyball team. Ugh...

balancing connections

[shokk]

Balancing three Satellite connections and three landlines is not such a big deal. With equipment like Israeli company Radware's LinkProof [radware.com] at both ends, the loss of one line would not be noticed. You can configure that equipment to aggregate all connections to multiply the bandwidth, including spreading VPN traffic across the lines, or just use the other lines as failover. These boxes are supposed to handle 10 connections and are very configurable and are veeeery configurable.

The same technology is available for smaller sites with their Linkproof Branch product.

Re:Why does NBC bother?

[NickV]

That's actually not true. It seems like NBC is planning on prempting ALL of their coverage on all of their networks (I wonder what they're going to do with CNBC during business hours... olympics + stock ticker?)

They'll be broadcasting it ALL across all 7 of their channels (bravo, cnbc, msnbc, telemundo, nbc, USA, nbcHD [local HD affiliates]. The HD broadcasts will be in 5.1 1080i too, which is pretty damn slick.

Of course, aside from a prestige thing, this looks like network programming suicide.

Re:That's nice, except...

[NickV]

I think that's the point... NBC is planning to show people that they can do good coverage, because ALOT of people complained ALOT about Sydney.

1200+ hours of live coverage across 7 channels all day is about as good as you can get.

Re:In case of nuclear terrorism

[robogun]

They don't have to actually pop one off over there - one phoned-in nuke threat could cause delays or cancellations costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

In other news...

[scifiber_phil]

The major networks only will be airing "Highlights" of the upcoming political conventions in the US. Guess whether a 15 year old gymnast falls off the balance beam is more important. American students suck at science, but they can sure bounce a ball and throw it through a hoop. Long live the cult of Sport.