Streaming Media - June/July 2008 - (Page 46) These days, a single televised baseball game offers enough stats and arcane data to satisfy a gaggle of rotisserie-league die-hards. With 302 events in 28 Olympics sports and more than 10,000 athletes competing, one can only imagine the amount of data that NBCOlympics.com will try to present to its online viewing audience. Collecting and processing that data is one thing, but presenting it to online viewers in a palatable way and developing an intuitive, user-friendly navigation structure is another. “Every different sport [comprises] multiple events,” says Matthew Rechs, CTO of Schematic, the interactive agency that is designing and building the Silverlight player for NBCOlympics.com. “Trying to figure out how people want to enjoy all of that [programming and related data], organizing it in the interface, and giving viewers the right ways to find it … that’s a really tough challenge.” To help meet that challenge, the NBCOlympics.com player offers a “metadata overlay” feature, which allows the player to display transparent data and navigation tools over the video window. This enables users to access statistics and other data without covering up, pausing, or leaving the primary video display. For example, play-byplay announcers’ dialogue can be keyed into an XML data stream, then rendered as a timecoded, scrolling text caption that transparently overlays the bottom of the video display. The player also enables the TiVo-like experience of pausing, rewinding, and replaying content, and these two features together allow viewers to use either the timecode or the play-by-play captioning to rewind to a specific point in the on-screen action and replay it. In addition, the “enhanced player mode” in the NBCOlympics.com player expands the video window into a full-screen view while retaining the transparent interface overlays. For those who lose track of time while watching women’s clean and jerk weightlifting, the “viewing alerts” feature enables pop-up notifications that let viewers know when selected events are starting. Schematic was the logical choice to design the NBCOlympics.com player for a number of reasons. Besides having designed NBCU’s first broadband player in 2006, Schematic had been hired that same year by Microsoft to provide feedback on Silverlight (before it was called Silverlight) and Microsoft’s Expression line of development tools. By the time NBCOlympics.com was ready to hire a designer for the Silverlight player, Schematic already had a team of 25 who had been working on Silverlight for more than a year. But taking responsibility for designing the player that would showcase Silverlight in its high-profile Olympics rollout was no small task. “It comes with a certain element of danger and jeopardy to be building something this big and important on a brand new platform,” says Rechs. “That always ups the excitement level.” streaming the olympics 46 STREAMING MEDIA June/July 2008 http://NBCOlympics.com http://NBCOlympics.com http://NBCOlympics.com http://NBCOlympics.com http://NBCOlympics.com http://NBCOlympics.com http://www.abacast.com/p2p
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