The Verge - London 2012 Olympics: tech of the world's biggest games

Lesson learned from #NBCFAIL: Olympic streams enhanced prime-time viewing

2012-09-26T11:55:06Z

The start of the Olympics should've been a big win for NBC. As the exclusive rights holder to the event, the media giant decided against live streaming the opening ceremony, and instead delayed the broadcast for US primetime TV viewers. The decision prompted #NBCFAIL to almost-perpetually trend on Twitter as the network continued to save the best events for delayed broadcast. However, through stats obtained via Twitter, surveys, and digital analytics, the company discovered what we'd expected to be true all along: multi-platform viewers spent longer watching the games than those who watched only on TV — over two hours more per day, in fact. More importantly, the broadcaster found that "the deluge of online viewing options did not...

NBC broke even on London Olympics coverage, had more than 219 million TV viewers in US

2012-09-07T00:50:04Z

NBC bet big on its coverage of the London Summer Olympics, and according to NBC Sports chairman Mark Lazarus the network ultimately broke even on the event, despite stellar television ratings. Speaking at the Bloomberg Sports Business Summit, Lazarus said that NBC's advertising sales for the event reached $1.25 billion, a jump of close to 50 percent compared to the previous Games in Beijing. He also revealed that the television broadcast of the Games ended up being watched by 219.4 million viewers. "We were fortunate many US teams and athletes performed very well, and that was good for our ratings," Lazarus said. Of course, TV wasn't the only platform NBC used to draw in visitors — the network's Olympics site had 744 million page views,...

YouTube offers live 2012 Paralympics video to US and Canada

2012-09-01T08:48:03Z

Cord cutters will have an easier time watching the 2012 Paralympics than they did watching the Olympics, thanks to live streams of all the events provided by YouTube. Unfortunately, the live streams only apply to people in the US and Canada, but the full archives of over 1,000 hours of archived footage will be available worldwide. Both live and archived video is available now at http://youtube.com/paralympicsporttv, where you'll also find video blogs from the athletes and interviews as well. The games run through September 9th, and if you catch an event live you'll also be able to use YouTube's real-time commenting feature.

Paralympic opening ceremony turns stadium into Large Hadron Collider

2012-08-30T12:44:23Z

The opening ceremony for the 2012 Paralympic Games in London last night was a celebration of science — titled "Enlightenment" and narrated in part by Stephen Hawking, the spectacle used dance and other visual effects to represent events including the Big Bang and the apparent discovery of the Higgs boson particle earlier this year. While the exact significance of some of the elements may not have been immediately clear to those in the audience, an official CERN blog post points out that the elusive particle was represented by a spherical group of silver umbrellas (earlier, dancers had performed a choreographed routine to Rihanna's 2007 hit "Umbrella"). Check out the festivities in the video below — while the ceremony as a whole...

YouTube viewers watched 231 million streams during London Olympics

2012-08-18T14:35:01Z

When it came to airing the London Olympics online, YouTube played a big role — not only did it stream the Games in 64 countries in Africa and Asia, it also supplied the technology behind NBC's streaming coverage in the US. Now YouTube has released some figures to show just how much its viewers made use of those options. In total more than 231 million streams were watched worldwide, 159 million of which came from NBC's Olympics site, while the rest came from the IOC YouTube channel. And of those stream views in the US, 37 percent came from mobile devices — this in spite of a number of complaints regarding the poor-quality of NBC's stream. These numbers follow the news that network's website also saw an impressive 744 million page...

Portrait video and other things cameras shouldn't let you do

2012-08-14T16:41:03Z

Image credit: albertizeme (Flickr)

Think of the most iconic sporting moments of the past couple of decades and then try to find the one thing they all have in common. That's right, it's the camera flashes. Like popcorn kernels hitting just the right temperature, cameras in the crowd explode with light as fans try to record those breathless moments that they'll one day be telling their grandkids about. As an expression of cultural togetherness, these synchronized photography sessions are great, but there's just one little problem: every one of those flash-"assisted" photos was a bad one. Conventional flashes are only meant to be used within a range of about 10 feet, not from the third deck of a giant sports arena.

More recently, the...

By the numbers: the social and digital explosion of the 2012 Olympics

2012-08-13T20:23:06Z

The 2012 Summer Olympics marks the first time that social media made a big splash with international sports fans. Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks have seen an explosion of engagement, and even traditional media outlets like BBC Sports took part in the digital revelry.

Twitter saw over 150 million tweets during the course of the games

Twitter saw over 150 million tweets during the course of the games with notable spikes during Kobe Bryant's dunk near the end of the USA-Spain basketball game and Hope Solo's diving save during the USA-Japan soccer match. Usain Bolt commanded the highest number of tweets per minute (TPM) at more than 80,000 TPM, followed closely by Britain's Andy Murray at over 57,000 TPM. Twitter's offical blog...

Tracking athletes' Twitter mentions over the Olympics

2012-08-12T02:56:18Z

The New York Times is back with another excellent infographic about the 2012 Olympics in London — this time showing Twitter activity on athletes' accounts. The graphic visualizes the number of mentions 140 verified accounts received over the games so far per 1,000 followers, honing in on when different athletes' mindshare peaked on Twitter. So, who won? Malaysian track cyclist Azizulhasni Awang (@AzizulAWANG) looks to have received the the most mentions per 1,000 followers (2,308) after his public apology for failing to obtain any medals. Michael Phelps' mentions, meanwhile, were dwarfed by his over 1,000,000 follower count.