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If you're dealing with the Super Bowl, you have to think big. Big players. Big media coverage. Big audience.
So it wasn't surprising that when NFL Films decided to do a series of pregame Webcasts for pro football's flagship event, it decided to go with a distribution technology that specializes in broadband, big volume delivery.
On the four nights before Super Bowl Sunday, gridiron fanatics tapped into Superbowl.com to see the live Webcast featuring player interviews, a wrapup of pre-game events and Hall of Fame guest commentators. Although streaming the game itself runs afoul of jealously guarded network broadcasting rights, there is plenty of opportunity to give fans more interactive pregame coverage than usual 10-second sound bite aired on the nightly news, according to NFL Films spokesman Dave Franza.
"NFL Films made the decision before the NFL season to prepare for the convergence between broadcast TV and Internet streaming video," he says. "Streaming would really give us the opportunity to stretch our traditional storytelling beyond television and to the Web."
"The general idea was to let the fans see the pageantry of the parties and the community events happening around the Super Bowl," Franza adds.
As one might expect, the Super Bowl attracts a huge wave of users. So NFL Films teamed up with NaviSite Inc., an applications hosting provider armed with a multi-network delivery scheme to handle Webcast fan rush.
NaviSite gathered deals with network and content distribution partners including iBeam Broadcasting Corp., Enron Corp., Evoke Communications, Digital Island Inc. and 10-15 other providers that preferred to fly under the publicity radar. During a high-volume event such as the Super Bowl Webcasts, NaviSite's StreamOS distribution system fires off streams across all of these networks, choosing the best route based on the networks' proximity and capacity.
The raw video is beamed via a traditional broadcast truck uplink to NaviSite's operations center in Andover, Mass. Using a system provided by partner Play Streaming Media Group, the feed is encoded in real time and then farmed out to servers on its partner networks for distribution.
StreamOS monitors the distribution during the event, so if one server in one network reaches capacity, the streams are switched to other servers, possibly on other partner networks. NaviSite also was behind the Nov. 28 Webcast promoting Madonna's live concert in London, which drew 9 million unique visitors.
While the Windows Streaming Media format used for the Super Bowl Webcast will have an option for 56k dialup users, the focus was on broadband with connection speeds offered at 100 kilobits per second and 300 kbps.
"We really view it from a future aspect as a broadband channel, but realistically we are looking at the fact there are a lot of narrowband users," Franza says.
Troy Snyder, NaviSite's streaming media division manager, says that while narrowband isn't disappearing, major event sponsors increasingly are looking to broadband to support more video-centric, interactive Web shows. "We really built ourselves around the really complex, marquee broadcasts as opposed to the simple Webcasts," Snyder says. "They really look at broadband delivery as their future."
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