watching the super bowl from berlin…
Wednesday, February 8th, 2012 at 10:37 am by Brian Ales
There are a lot of great things about living in Europe. Staying up until 3:30 AM on a Monday morning to watch the Super Bowl is not one of them, but as a NY Giants fan for life (evidently a hereditary condition) and considering the great game these two teams played four years ago the last time they met in the Super Bowl, I had no choice. No choice, I tell you!
So I stayed up way past my bedtime Sunday night. Although the game was broadcast on German television, I opted instead for NBCsports.com and the first ever streaming of a Super Bowl for the US commentary.
I chose the US website for the play-by-play coverage in English – but as it turned out, there were other advantages to watching the game online too…
Unlike what’s called football in the rest of the world, to watch an American football game is to watch a heavily mediated experience – alternating bursts of action and strategy make it perfectly suited for multiple camera angles, continuous sportscaster commentary, quick-cut editing, and slow motion replays. I know it’s a violent game (as is ‘rest-of-the-world’ football, when you consider the near total lack of player protection) – but I maintain that if they invented a sport from scratch for the medium of television, it would end up looking a lot like American football (witness this catch from the game).
It’s quite a feat, making a live event look and feel as neatly packaged and slickly produced as a movie – and they’ve gotten really good at it (and we’ve gotten really used to it). That’s why watching the game online turned out to be so unexpectedly compelling:
As you can see from the screenshot above, viewers could choose between the main traditional TV feed (i.e. with a director switching between cameras) and any of the static source cameras. Wanna stay on the camera suspended by cables above the field and watch the growing sense of urgency in Tom Brady’s face as he huddles with his offense between plays from just a few meters above his head? No problem! But not only does this offer the opportunity to see things you’ve never seen before on a televised football game – you also have the option to slow down the frenetic cutting between cameras you didn’t realize you had become so used to.
And that’s how I ended up watching a lot of the game, staying on one camera for minutes at a time. It’s a little ironic that one new technology allowed me the choice to ‘turn off’ (or at least slow down) another technology, but without the relentless quick camera cuts, I was suddenly able to experience the game suddenly as a more live, real-time event (in fact, except for all the commercial breaks, it was almost like watching ein Fußball-Spiel here in Berlin).
Was it perfect? No – as you can see, video resolution wasn’t exactly up to ’30 Rock on Hulu’ standards. That was to be expected, given the scaling issues involved with the live streaming of was expected to be (and indeed did become) the most-watched US television broadcast in history (with the amount of traffic hitting those servers, I was happy with not a single rebuffering dropout). Also, every time I switched to a new camera, it took 3-4 seconds for the stream to refresh – but still, all in all, it was pretty impressive. Kudos to NBC for the vision (and courage) to do it, kudos to Microsoft’s Silverlight 4 video streaming platform, and kudos to whatever content delivery system they used.
That it streamed as well as it did, and that it offered a new viewing experience via allowing the user to switch between cameras? A win for video streaming (oh yeah, and for the Giants!)



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