Wimbledon on the Web: Smooth HD Comes to US Sports
Andy Tarczon, Founding Partner
June 22, 2009
The sport of tennis is the artful combination of focused strength and finesse. A powerful serve backed by quick reactions and rapid shifts across the net. Hard to tell if I am describing the game or the upcoming Wimbledon coverage that NBC will be delivering via Microsoft Silverlight and the Smooth Streaming adaptive bitrate technology. (See istreamplanet’s release). Coverage begins today on http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/.
Last week, I visited the video encoding gurus at Inlet Technologies. We got hands on with Smooth and examined the efforts behind the recent French Open, Indy 500 (non-Smooth), and Apple’s adaptive bitrate streaming for the new iphone. When it comes to a high quality web viewing experience, adaptive streaming is THE battleground involving industry players such as Move Networks, Microsoft, Adobe, and Apple. Much like the game of tennis, adaptive streaming allows the server to quickly react to the conditions happening across the net. A video stream is able to throttle up or down the stream bandwidth to deliver the best possible quality without the skips, stops, or rebuffering of traditional streaming. Further, video starts are almost instantaneous – faster than changing a channel on a digital set top box.
Wimbledon is being hailed as the first US demonstration of Smooth for a live sporting event, though Move’s player has been delivered a number of HD events for ESPN360 already. While we have noted that Move has had the clear quality advantage, it appears Smooth may be rapidly catching up. With several product announcements tied around Windows 7 release, it will be very interesting to see how quality of delivery becomes an important metric. This is the just the beginning of a battle that will definitely extend beyond the competitors on the courts of Wimbledon.
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