NBC Olympics relies on Blue Order to keep Highlights Factory running smoothly

NBC Olympics will use Blue Order Solutions for asset management needs during the network’s coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games this August 8-24. NBC Olympics has relied on Blue Order in previous games, including Salt Lake City (2002), Athens (2004) and Torino (2006). But this year NBC challenged Blue Order to enhance the enterprise Media Asset Management platform Media Archive in order to provide NBC with a “Highlights Factory,” enabling NBC’s coverage of the Beijing Olympics via Online, On-Demand and Mobile services.

“Olympic fans will have access to approximately 2,200 total hours of
live streaming video coverage on NBCOlympics.com,” says David Mazza,
Senior Vice President, Engineering, NBC Olympics. “In addition,
NBCOlympics.com will also feature approximately 300-400 hours of clip
based Olympic Highlights, Rewinds and Encores. Blue Order’s Media
Archive will be instrumental in rapidly selecting, editing, and
preparing packages for distribution to our new media outlets.”

Distributed and replicated over two locations – China and the USA – Media Archive will import content ingested via Omneon Media Deck, logs created in NBC’s OPIS logging system, and statistics data received from IDS. Editors based in the U.S. will then select recorded events and top and tail them for re-runs or subclip them to create highlights packages. The defined packages are then forwarded to distribution, including both the transcoded media and the timeline related metadata.

“The Highlights Factory puts Media Archive in the heart of the production chain for NBC New Media coverage of the Beijing Olympics,” says Dr. Frank Rauch, Chairman, Blue Order Solutions. “Bringing together media and metadata originating both in China and the USA, Media Archive provides both the business process management and the editorial interface to for this coverage, independent of the physical location of the users.”

In China, the Highlights Factory will record up to 40 streams in SD and 1 stream in HD. In the USA, additional 2 SD and 5 HD channels are available for ingest. Proxies, keyframes and metadata will be fully replicated between both sites. China high res material selected for re-use in New Media is transcoded to long GOP MPEG and subsequently transferred to the USA for packaging to the various distribution channels. To enrich the online experience, Media Archive also includes relevant pieces of selected metadata timelines (manually created logs and IDS sports statistics) into the delivery package submitted to downstream processing.