Chris Albrecht from NewTeeVee recently posted an article about some of the ways the Olympics have pushed the envelope of online video technology. NBC has made over 2,200 hours of video available on NBCOlympics.com.

As Chris points out, Microsoft and Digital Rapids were forced to innovate themselves out of some unique challenges related to how much hardware space was available to NBC in the Olympic broadcast center:

“To help fit in those constraints, Digital Rapids and Microsoft came up with a new technology called Dynamic Complexity that scales the amount of encoding power from the CPU based on what is being shown. For example, with an actual sporting event, you want to make sure all of those action-packed bits get transmitted, so the video doesn’t get compressed as much. For something more sedate, like video of a talking head, you don’t need as many bits, so you can compress the video more. The Dynamic Complexity helps even out the loads being carried by the bandwidth.”

The basic idea here is that what the human brain considers “very high quality” is not strictly dependent on bitrate alone; the actual content of the video combined with the bitrate determines what is considered great quality. Watching Bob Costas, as a relatively stationary figure, can be delivered at a lower bitrate while still “looking” like very high quality video to the viewer.

This is another good example of how additional intelligence about the video itself, by looking inside the video, can lead to better results and why publishers need to look past legacy video platform providers for next generation solutions. I expect to see more innovation like this from ourselves and others in the future.

Alex