Smooth Streaming Live in HD 2010 Olympic Winter GamesScott Stanfield CEOVertigoscott@vertigo.com

Bob Cowherd Olympics Project LeadVertigobob@vertigo.com

2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games

Video• 46 million total unique users• 710 million page views • 45 million video streams serving more than 3.5 million hours of video

Photo • NBC: 1,573 galleries and 41,560 photos• Universal Sports: 4,400 galleries and 75,663 photos Video Bitrates• 3.45 Mbps – 1280 x 720 @ 30 fps• 1.95 Mbps – 848 x 480 @ 30 fps• 1.25 Mbps – 640 x 360 @ 30 fps• 900 Kbps – 512 x 288 @ 30 fps• 600 Kbps – 400 x 224 @ 30 fps• 400 Kbps – 312 x176 @ 30 fps

Stats

FEATURE RUN DOWNNBCOlympics.com

• No buffering• Supports HD for

users with high-end machines/connections without compromising the experience for low-end machines

HD-quality video using IIS Smooth Streaming Technology

• Allows users to direct their own experience

• Jog dial to rewind and fast-forward allows smooth and quick viewing of interesting content

• Slow motion allows sports fans to examine their favorite moments in detail

DVR "Trick Play" control

• Quickly navigate interesting content via Key events on the timeline, menu

• Get deeper detail when watching an event via the play by play menu

Play-by-play and Key Events

• Allow fans of the site to become evangelists by embedding short videos in their blogs

Embedded Player

• IAB-certified solution required – 3rd party (DART) DLL needs to actually schedule the ads

• Special logic needed to preserve a good UX for user who DVR back in the timeline

• Hot-swappable configuration changes allow ad templates (composition) to be changed on the fly

• Ad settings can similarly be changed (ex. 2 minute grace period on DVR ad model)

• Tier 1 Sponsor Integration allows custom sponsorships

Advanced advertising integration

• Recommendations, Most Popular Videos, Video by Athlete, by Sport, Schedules, Athletes Related to this Video

• Provide as many possible ways to explore a huge amount of video content• Maintain immersion in the player, keep high dwell times• Allow “snacking” on video

Video Content Explorer

• Allow users to keep their fingers on the pulse of the Olympics on Twitter without leaving the player experience

• Maintain immersion in the player to keep high dwell times

Twitter

BEHIND THE SCENES

• It’s all about the manifest

Smooth Streaming File Types

Fragmented MP4s:• MP4 files: Video

and Audio (*.ismv/.isma)

• Server Manifest File (*.ism)

• Client Manifest File (*.ismc)

• Key Events Display on Timeline• Advertising integration• Ads and PBP markers come across as

“in-stream” data tracks - you stream data just like you stream video

• Advertising insertion via a back-end tool

• Let’s look at this on the manifest

Features Driven by In-Stream Data

• Instant VOD Replays, Instant Highlight creation – big win for NBC• Live feed ends, player automatically becomes a VOD player• On stream stop, manifest itself changes “IsLive” attribute to “false”. Player hides

live mode• Live manifest (.ISML) now copied over to a “VOD” location (.ISM). • CDN (Akamai) issues HTTP 302 redirects to VOD manifest for live manifest requests• No video data needs to be copied – the existing ISMVs are just referenced from a

VOD manifest

Live to VOD Transitions

• Rough Cut Editor – “Instant” highlights (see Jason’s session)• Highlight clips can start to be edited before the events in the clip

have finished occurring in real life!• Composite Manifest files (.CSM) • References other smooth streaming manifests – only makes head

requests.• ClipBegin/ClipEnd specified, relevant chunk references copied into

the .CSM file.• Editors can create highlight clips without creating an actual new

video or modifying any existing video, so storage cost is fixed.• Highlights of several different videos can be set up in a composite

manifest that references them all. • Let’s take a look at a .CSM file

Highlight Creation and the RCE

Rough Cut Editor

Rough Cut Editor

• The SSME (an underlying component of the SMF) is resilient to errors codes (502s, 404s, etc.) on up to 50 consecutive chunks.

• Beyond that, player must cleanly handle failures:– Auto-retry on Media Failure (built in

to SMF)– Display Alt. recommendations on

Stream Failure• Demo: Let’s see how this works

using Fiddler…

Graceful Failure Handling

• TTL Values for Player Assets, Video Streams– Balance origin offload vs. stale content

• Cache-busting– Bust the client and proxy-side caches without

busting the CDN’s edge server cache (DOS attack). – Requires CDN configuration to ignore client/proxy

cache-busting query string parameters. (Let’s look at an example in Fiddler)

• Security/URL Protection– Issue 403s on manifest requests that lack the

authentication cookie• Geo-blocking

– Restrict content per IP such that only U.S. traffic is allowed for NBCOlympics.com, Canadian traffic is allowed for CTV.com, etc.

CDN Configuration (Akamai)

• Conviva– Real time traffic numbers– Error tracking– Media Failures vs. Stream Failures– Trends analysis: we can see problems as they start to happen and

proactively fix them– Can also restrict to a specific player ID

• Akamai– Reports on 4xx/5xx, origin errors, high/low traffic errors– Basic traffic reporting - tonnage reports, manifest totals, egress

numbers• Smooth Streaming Health Monitoring

– Allows you to see actual SSME health statistics live in real time.• Other logging:

– Advertising consumption logging to DART– Video consumption logging to Omniture, Nielsen– Install tracking logging to Microsoft

Logging, Real-time Health Monitoring

Real Time Health Monitoring

Smooth Streaming Health Monitor

• MVVM Pattern– Separation of concerns within the code– Designers can work on views as developers

build ViewModels • Enforce “Blendability”

– If a code change causes a View to not work in Blend, fix immediately.

• Continuous Integration, Automated Deployments – Zero Friction– One-click deployments to any environment– Automate obfuscation, versioning of XAP and JS

assets– Archive all builds deployed beyond build site – Expose build environment to all partners

Design and Development Methodology

• Securing our video streams: – Strategy: Don’t allow unauthorized apps to play the Olympics streams. – Time server sync up– Beacon call – send out a hashed shared secret plus the time value.– Akamai (CDN) will return 403s on the video chunks if the auth cookie becomes invalid

• Man in the middle defense: – Strategy: Don’t allow unauthorized apps to launch videos in our player. – Video key generated by the host domain and passed in to the DOM.– Key constructed by hashing a shared secret plus the Video URL and ID.– Player refuses to play video if the keys don’t match.

• Entitlement- Verify MSO subscription for premium content.

Authentication and Security

• 3rd party cookies:- MSN.com (Video content) vs.

NBCOlympics.com (player assets)• Corporate/University Proxies

Other Lessons Learned

Mio Babic, CEO of iStreamPlanet– Live Ad Insertion Demo– Back End Video

Workflow• Video Workflow

Automation• Origins at SuperNAP

2010 Vancouver Olympics - Video Delivery

Video Delivery – Transmission Diagram

Video Workflow

• 17 days• 4,483hrs of content• 834 live events• 25 concurrent live streams• 100% success• 5 people

• iSP Video Workflow Automation• Scheduling• Content Acquisition• Video Routing• Encoding• Publishing Points Management• Live-to-VOD transitioning• API or Web Interface Controls

Building For Scalability & Reliability

Event Scheduler

• Slideshow mode allows easy one-by-one viewing of automatically advancing galleries.

• Grid Mode allows free-form and quick navigation of larger galleries.

• Scroll to zoom in and out of photos• Scope of the Olympics Photo experience:

– NBC: 1,573 galleries and 41,560 photos– Universal Sports: 4,400 galleries and 75,663 photos

• Smooth Streaming for Deep Zoom

Photo Viewer

Q&A

Scott Stanfield scott@vertigo.com