by Jim McGrath, SVP, Production
Eight is a lucky number in China. The word for it — ba — sounds so close to the word for wealth that many people believe eight is a number that is linked to prosperity. So it is no surprise that the opening ceremonies for the Olympic Games were at 8:08:08 p.m. on 8/8/08.
The date was also special for Schematic. For the last 8 months a team of designers and developers has been working diligently with MSFT, NBC, Delta Tre (CMS), 2 CDNs (Limelight and Akamai), Omniture, DoubleClick, and multiple NBC constituents to bring the Olympic Silverlight video player into being. NBCOlympics.com is one of the most ambitious projects on the web and one of the largest Silverlight applications deployed today. You can see it right here.
And if you do check out that link, you won’t be alone: on Friday there were 70 million page views. On Saturday the site had 3.1 million video starts.
The NBC Olympics player will provide access to every moment of video of every event at the Beijing games; value-added features provide both context and control for users. The standard version of the player enables users to view on-demand and related video as well as athlete bios, sport-specific information and trivia. Schematic was completely responsible for creating the Enhanced experience. The enhanced video player provides near HD quality video and picture-in-picture capability; it also uses Silverlight’s transparency capabilities so users can simultaneously navigate through menus while watching an event onscreen. Users can also track the action and navigate via a continuous stream of broadcasters’ live expert commentary and play by play links. The standout feature is the “Live Video Control Room,” which allows viewers to select videos, configure the display and watch as many as four live video streams simultaneously.
But the real story is the Schematic team and the outstanding service the team provided our client. The team had to balance the marketing needs of MSFT, against the business goals of NBC (advertising) against the technical complexities of developing an application on an alpha then beta platform for content that was to be delivered on an infrastructure that was being built as we were developing. Schematic helped MSFT minimize the risk of such an ambitious, high-profile development. We were trusted consultants who weighed in on the features Silverlight needed to support, and we actually helped the MSFT team debug Silverlight.
Cross office collaboration was fantastic; it involved New York, Atlanta, Costa Rica and Los Angeles. We have a 6 month running Skype chat. Hopefully the team will not go into withdrawal after the project is over. Collaboration with other vendors was important as most of them did not have services set up for Silverlight and Schematic worked with them to define and develop the features necessary to support Silverlight. Travel was a necessity. Team members traveled to NYC, to Atlanta, to Redmond, and to Turin. Mix it up and do it again and then do it again. I don’t even know what that last trip to Turin was for, but Seth and Cory said it was necessary. The team went above and beyond to hit critical launch dates repeatedly–working with a team this talented and dedicated was a pleasure.
