Live From PyeongChang: As Streaming Numbers Soar, Connected Devices are the Breakout Star for NBC Olympics Enhanced Viewing Experience adds informative, interactive touch to digital device UI By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital Thursday, February 22, 2018 - 2:39 pm
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Despite the worries regarding the dramatic time zone shift coming into these Winter Games [PyeongChang is a full 15 hours ahead of EST], NBC Olympics in the U.S. has blown its streaming numbers out of the water.
For the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, NBCOlympics.com and the NBC Sports app have already tripled the amount of live streaming events it saw at the 2014 Sochi Games.
In numbers reported by NBC Sports (which it attributes to Adobe Analytics), viewers logged a whopping 1.31 billion live streaming minutes on NBCOlympics.com and through the NBC Sports app as of February 18. That number already tripled the same total metric from the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics and with more than a week to spare. In addition, there was 11.6 million uniques as of the same date, which is up 174% from Sochi (4.3 million).
Things are going well. But outside of the natural growth in usership of authenticated live streaming apps over the past four years, what's the deal? In the eyes of execs at NBC Olympics, the key reason for the explosion in digital viewers is Connected TV. Devices like Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire none of which, mind you, even existed during the last Winter Olympic Games are providing an easy to navigate environment and a lean-back experience on one's home television screen.
We've been blown away by Connected, says Rick Cordella, EVP and GM, Digital Media for NBC Sports Group. Historically, the Olympics have seen our primetime' audience come in around noon on a weekday when everyone's taking their lunch break. Now it's shifted with Connected TVs where we are mirroring what [linear] TV is seeing. So, our peaks are at night in primetime, they're on Saturday and Sundays, and we have a large number of people streaming tape-delayed coverage on NBCSN, which has never happened before.
Rick Cordella, EVP and GM, Digital Media, NBC Sports Group says connected TV device usage has been a boon to this Olympics' streaming numbers.
Cordella noted that the app experience on a phone or laptop is great for viewing on the go but tends to deliver shorter use times. Through the Connected TV devices, users are more likely to throw an event on their big screen and consume content for longer stretches.
If you think about the different platforms: desktop and mobile, he says, you seek out content. You know it's there, you know what you want to watch, you want to go find it, you watch it, and you're done. Now we're seeing the sort of lean back experience of TV with all the connected devices. Like I mentioned, we had a few hundred thousand people watching NBC's taped coverage on a Sunday afternoon. We're saying wow, never seen that before.' That's been the big change.
Delivering the Experience
For all of its international rightsholding broadcasters, the IOC's host broadcaster, Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) produces a white label version of a live streaming app that can be taken and directly delivered to consumers. Major broadcasters like NBC Sports, however, choose instead to take OBS's package of APIs (application programming interface) and SDKs (software-development kits) in order to plug the live streaming video and event data directly into its own existing app. The obvious benefit of that is that many viewers may already have the NBC Sports app on their device and the network wins with the branding and exposure that comes with pushing new users to a primary app. Plus, the friction to get a user to download a new app for a two-week event is tremendously high and a broadcaster loses all of that valuable user data when the event is over with a one-off white label app.
A big thing for us was the Super Bowl was just three days prior [to the start of the Olympics], says Cordella. So you have all these new people coming in and downloading the [NBC Sports] app. We obviously had an enormous audience for the Super Bowl and we actually have seen a pretty good crossover of that audience back with us at the Olympics. I think it really benefited us having that happening just three days in advance.
On the backend, NBC Olympics' live streaming experience is a product of NBC Sports' Playmaker Media and its technology partner iStreamPlanet. More than 75 staffers work through the night in Stamford, CT at NBC Sports' facility to support and QC the technology of the live streaming product.
Plus, the Olympics aren't happening in a silo for NBC Sports. It's other properties, including the NFL, NHL, and Premier League, all continue to test the infrastructure's capabilities on a nightly basis.
It's all still powered by the same technology stack, says Eric Black, Chief Technology Officer of NBC Sports Digital and Playmaker Media. Its really just a balance of volume and, frankly, overnights since our staff is largely here [in Stamford] from 8 p.m. ET on. The volume and the concurrency of what we're doing is pretty on-par with what we see on most of our weekends. The difference is its every night for 17 straight nights. That's where the challenges lie.
Enhancing the Experience
Users may have noticed a few new enhancements to this Olympics' streaming experience. NBC Sports is calling it Enhanced Viewing Experience as the network leverages its archived media assets and data feeds coming in from OBS to provide a more informative and interactive UI.
During the Primetime Show viewers are welcomed with a slate of information, including a rundown of the events and athletes to be featured that night. Chr
