Thus spoke Darryl Jefferson, responsible
for the incredibly successful US Olympics coverage at NBCUniversal, at the
SMPTE industry lunch on 23 October 2012.
His reference was to the need for meticulous metadata labelling of all
the material they had – something absolutely symptomatic of the new age of file
based programme production.
We didn’t really need the statistics from
Darryl because everyone knows that the Olympic Games in summer 2012 were the
most successful television event in the history of mankind – but we got them.
What can you say about 82 million
television viewers (just in the US)?
Maybe even more phenomenal than the television audience, which we might
expect to be high, was the huge US Internet audience. There were 57 million unique visitors, and at
times the Olympic streams were consuming 35-50% of the entire US internet
bandwidth. 3000 highlight packages were produced.
There was 2500 staff working in London, with
200 cameras providing pictures in addition to those from the IOC OBS.
Part of the production success was the use
of a Media Access management system, which allowed the NBCU teams in New York,
Florida (for the Spanish services), and elsewhere to find and call up items
instantly from the available material.
Darryl claimed that the event showed ‘Television
is not dead’. Maybe so, but it appears
to have an ever growing large room-mate.
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