London 2012 Olympics: tech of the world’s biggest games – The Verge

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

2012-09-26T07:55:06-04:00

london olympics_1020

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. …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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

2012-09-06T20:50:04-04:00

london olympics_1020

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 onl …

Read the full story at The Verge.

YouTube offers live 2012 Paralympics video to US and Canada

2012-09-01T04:48:03-04:00

Paralympics youtube

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.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Paralympic opening ceremony turns stadium into Large Hadron Collider

2012-08-30T08:44:23-04:00

Higgs boson at Paralympics opening ceremony

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 " …

Read the full story at The Verge.

YouTube viewers watched 231 million streams during London Olympics

2012-08-18T10:35:01-04:00

National Gallery_1020

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. The …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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

2012-08-14T12:41:03-04:00

iPad taking video (flickr albertizime credit)

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 …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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

2012-08-13T16:23:06-04:00

EPSN social media

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 tha …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Tracking athletes’ Twitter mentions over the Olympics

2012-08-11T22:56:18-04:00

New York Times Twitter olympics mentions infographic

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.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Usain Bolt: full-time Olympic legend, part-time sports photographer

2012-08-10T04:19:03-04:00

usain bolt

Usain Bolt's grabbing all the headlines today following another dominant performance at the London 2012 Olympics, this time in defense of his 200m sprint title. In amongst the pictures accompanying coverage of his feat, however, you might find a few taken by the "living legend" himself.

In the immediate aftermath of his victory, Bolt borrowed a Nikon D4 from Swedish photographer Jimmy Wixtröm and proceeded to take some impromptu pictures of his surroundings - a first-person visualization of what it means to be the fastest man in the world, if you will. Wixtröm's newspaper, Aftonbladet, has posted up a few of Bolt's images over on its websit …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Fans turn to mobile devices for Olympic searches, says Google

2012-08-07T07:03:49-04:00

Google Olympic searches infographic

Fans have been turning to smartphones and tablets for Olympics-related information in record numbers, according to statistics released by Google yesterday, with Europeans making a higher proportion of mobile Google searches than inhabitants of any other continent. Writing on the company's Mobile Ads Blog - which means these self-serving figures shouldn't be taken entirely at face value - marketing execs Dai Pham and Adam Grunewald describe how, in most European countries, more than a third of relevant Google searches occurred through the mobile site or mobile apps over the first two days of the Games. Many of these can be attributed to "seco …

Read the full story at The Verge.