This year’s Olympics is being touted as the “most digitally-enabled Winter Olympics of all time” – this year’s logo (right) even includes a URL. I expect that title will be reclaimed every Olympic year from here on out, but it’s still quite the accomplishment for this year’s organizers.
More people than ever will watch the games on TV, online and on their mobile devices and several companies are going all out to make sure those experiences hold up to demand and expectations. With 213,000 spectators expected to show up for the games in person, Sochi is going to experience a major wave of demand for data and network access – and that doesn’t include all the tweeting, following and other online activities the athletes themselves are sure to engage in. From TheStreet:
Avaya, which is the official supplier of networking equipment to Sochi 2014, expects about 120,000 devices to access the Olympics’ network, from smartphones to tablets and laptops. Clearly, Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, will be a key technology theme in the Black Sea resort.
“We are calling this the largest BYOD Olympics, ever,” explained an Avaya spokeswoman, in an email to TheStreet. To cope with Wi-Fi demand, Avaya has deployed 2,500 wireless access points throughout the Olympic venues. Each device will be assigned a specific level of access based on the user’s log-in credentials by using Avaya’s Identity Engines technology.
By way of comparison, Cisco, the networking partner for London 2012, enabled 1,800 Wi-Fi hot spots when the summer games were held in the British capital.
On top of that, even more viewers will be accessing information, videos and social media from around the global – especially during hot events. NBC, which owns broadcasting rights for the games, paired with Adobe to make sure viewers on a range of devices can access the content they crave. This stress on mobile and desktop in addition to traditional TV viewing is another reason this year’s games are particularly dedicated to digital. A thousand hours of live streaming are predicted by the time the games are done.
Adobe is working with Comcast’s NBC Olympics to provide digital broadcasting of the Sochi games across desktops and mobile devices via its Primetime technology.
The San Jose, Calif.-based firm is no stranger to the Olympics, having worked with NBC on its coverage of the 2012 London games. “The main takeaway from London is really about making sure that the more content that can be made available across devices, the more consumption will happen,” Jeremy Helfand, vice president of Adobe’s Primetime business, told TheStreet. “Sports seems to be a driving content channel for video consumption online.”
And that relentless accessing of online content is going to continue for the entire 17 days of the Olympics. So how do you prepare for a major event like this? With a lot of testing. Atos Origin, the games’ global IT partner, reports that 100,000 hours of testing have already gone into these games, and that might not even include independent companies associated with the Olympics digital presence (like Adobe or Microsoft). With such a global event (and a website that automatically redirects you to the correct language), those testing hours almost certainly involved a fair amount of localization testing.
Still, everyone knows that testing doesn’t ensure perfection. NBC needs to take another look at it’s Olympics site – a feature that lets you sort the TV listings page by sport hasn’t work correctly for a few days. And Kapersky Labs is warning people in Sochi to be vigilant against cyber crime.
There is, however, concern that visitors to the games could easily fall prey to cybercriminals. Kaspersky Lab, the official supplier of anti-virus software to Sochi 2014, has already warned visitors to be on their guard against hackers.
“With the rising sophistication of cybercrime, events like the Winter Olympics raise legitimate concerns about its dangers,” explained Kaspersky Lab, in a blog post earlier this week. “Extra caution is required while using public Wi-Fi networks. Avoid using any unprotected network, as your Internet traffic can be relatively easy for criminals, who are connected to the same hotspot, to intercept it.”
These challenges are only going to grew during future games, so it will be interesting to see how the first “most digitally-enabled Winter Olympics” and all the important players handle it this year.