High Speed Satellite Internet and the Future of Olympic Broadcasting
♫ August 12th, 2010 11:26 pmBitrate is the bandwidth used to send a stream to the listener. If you are going to broadcast via the internet you must choose a bitrate to send the content to the listener. When choosing bitrate you must take into consideration your target audience. Will my listeners be using a broadband connection such as dsl or cable, or will they be using a dial up connection.
I was reading an article on the history of Olympic television coverage. As some might know, the 1932 Olympics was the first television program to ever be broadcast using satellites. It wasn’t until the 1960′s when United States viewers started getting live coverage of the games.
In the 1990′s, CBS started using additional cable outlet’s to give viewers more viewing opportunities for their winter Olympic broadcasts. Then in 2004, NBC took the next step and expended their coverage even more with 24 hour-a-day coverage on their family of cable networks. Now, in 2010, coverage has again extended thanks to high-speed satellite internet as many of the events are now being streamed live on the internet.
For the Olympics, this seemed like the next logical step. When it comes to the Olympic movement is steeped in tradition and aren’t as open to change as some might want it to be, they do love to update technologically. The Olympics is big money and the IOC makes a lot of it selling broadcasting rights for their games.
While NBC, the primary broadcaster for the games and the exclusive US broadcaster, they keep their live broadcasting for their afternoon and prime time coverage, which gets big numbers for their advertisers. For Olympic lovers it has always been a complaint that they rarely get to see full coverage of events. NBC focuses almost exclusively on US competitors and usually focus on just their performances.
Bitrate is the bandwidth used to send a stream to the listener. If you are going to broadcast via the internet you must choose a bitrate to send the content to the listener. When choosing bitrate you must take into consideration your target audience. Will my listeners be using a broadband connection such as dsl or cable, or will they be using a dial up connection.
While NBC is slowly learning how to utilize the internet for their coverage, other broadcasters, have fully embraced internet broadcast for the Olympics. CTV, the Canadian broadcaster for the Vancouver games, are broadcasting all events live on their website. Unfortunately for US viewers online, the coverage is blacked out for anyone on this side of the boarder (that is NBC’s doing). The same goes for the European coverage. The European Union broadcaster allows views in EU countries to watch most events live online, though they are not available for viewing in the US.
Next year, the International Olympic Committee will take bids on which United States network will provide coverage of the summer and winter Olympic Games beginning in 2014. NBC, FOX and an joint ABC/ ESPN bid are all in the running to broadcast the next four Olympic games with the winning network paying over a billion dollars for the privilege. Whether or not the next broadcaster will incorporate internet coverage into their package is yet to be seen, but chances are as the net becomes more relevant in live broadcasts, we will see more live streaming Olympic coverage in the United States.
Internet Radio Broadcasting – About Bitrates
♫ July 18th, 2010 9:34 pmBitrate is the bandwidth used to send a stream to the listener. If you are going to broadcast via the internet you must choose a bitrate to send the content to the listener. When choosing bitrate you must take into consideration your target audience. Will my listeners be using a broadband connection such as dsl or cable, or will they be using a dial up connection.
Streaming at a bitrate higher than the listener can download results in buffering. This basically means the stream is stopped while the listeners player downloads enough of the stream to resume playing. Obviously the listener will not want to continue listening to the stream if he has to wait 30 seconds or so in the middle of a song.
Generally a dial up listener can listen to a stream that broadcasts between 8kbs and 32kbs without experiencing buffering depending on the individual listeners connection. Dial up modems can accomodate a maximum band width of 56k although the actual bitrate can vary from 21k to around 52k dependant on the phone line.
Broadband listeners can listen to audio streams at a much higher bitrate. The highest bitrate recommended to stream music to broadband listeners is 128kbs. Why? Music cd’s are recorded at 128kbs. Any streaming above this bitrate is just a waste of your bandwidth. Of course you can choose any rate between 8kbs and 128kbs to stream to broadband.
Whats the alternative if you wish to include multiple bitrates? The alternative is to get stream hosting that allows you to broadcast at multiple bitrates. Many stream hosts offer packages that include several different bitrates to effectively let you stream to a larger audience. You send the stream from your computer to said stream server and it sends the stream to your listeners at the multiple bitrates. You can also send your stream to multiple stream servers if you choose in the event that one stream server fails, your stream will still be up and running.