The Olympics had a dedicated session on the
last day at the SMPTE conference. This
blogger reported on the 3D coverage in an earlier blog, but other interesting issues
came up in the session.
The
practical details of the NBCU ‘multiscreen’ services were given. This is the services provided to mobiles,
PCs, and tablets. The production and
distribution facilities were massive, and the results for users were creative
and elegant. For example, tablet users
could watch the live feed on the left and more information (or ads) on the
right. How much has the environment changed since the
last Games because of the massive use of Tablets today! The NBCU service was a real ‘tour de force’. But
just for 17 days?
Even more novel information came from the
presentation on the copy protection measures that NBCU took to protect their
content from piracy during the games.
This information is difficult to find, so you should download the
presentation if you want more.
NBCU paid 1.18 billion dollars for the
rights alone to show the Games in the US, so you could imagine they would pay
more than scant attention to protecting the content. In brief they derive a digital ‘fingerprint’
for each short segment of the content, which is a digital word derived from the
segment, and which would be is different
from that for any other segment.
This is used to check whether anyone is
illegally streaming their content, by deriving the fingerprint for any
suspected content, and comparing them.
If they match, they know they have a pirate. They ask the portal to take down the
segment. They have a team of ‘internet
investigators’ who monitor the web 24/7.
I suppose this will be the ‘shape of things
to come’ for much content in the years ahead.
Do you agree?
David Wood
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