Building the BBC's Olympic site

I agree. When I first thought about watching the Olympics online I was just expecting to see a version of iplayer with the usual BBC1 and 2 coverage. What they pulled off was incredible. The people behind it should be very proud for actually delivering something that pushes beyond just replicating the TV experience.

My only issue was with Flash. I'm not into bashing Flash just for the sake of it, but my only frustrations were caused by Flash just not living up to the rest of the delivery experience. I think it was the hardware acceleration issue that is already mentioned in their FAQ. Geting the video to play was sometimes a case of throw a 6 to start.

I was particularly impressed by the event markers. For example, it was quite the novelty to click on a marker and be taken back to the beginning of a particular persons dive, then jump back to the live stream.

To my mind the mechanics of live streaming and streaming archived content are completely different and you usually have to wait ages for a live broadcast to be archived off for on-demand playback, yet the BBC somehow managed to blur the distinction. It might not be that difficult in reality but it was impressive to me.

I used a VPN to watch some of the Olympic coverage on the BBC's website. While the video playback sometimes failed, I was simply blown away by all the options they provided. One aspect I never dug into much at all was on the data side. The infrastructure to input, compile and output it all is quite a amazing. I'll bet it was a fun project to work on!