Let the Games begin, online
(CNN) — The Beijing Games have officially become the first YouTube Olympics.
Earlier this week the IOC reached an agreement with Google, owner of YouTube, to allow highlights to be broadcast in 77 territories around the world where digital rights to the Games haven’t been sold.
And in countries where digital rights have been sold the pressure to prevent illegal piracy is being stepped up.
As Beijing clears the streets in sweeps for pirated DVDs, the Chinese government’s National Copyright Administration announced stiff new laws prohibiting the uploading of videos of Olympic events to unauthorized Web sites or face fines up $15,000.
With the profusion of social networking and peer-to-peer file sharing Web sites, does this mean spectators will be shaken down for every video camera and digital phone held aloft during Olympic events?
No, says Stephane Kanah, head of digital media for the International Olympic Committee (IOC). So far as the IOC is concerned, the message to individuals who want to share personal videos online from Olympic events is this: Go for it.
For a spectator to take pictures or video and put it on a blog, usually we tend to tolerate this, Kanah says.
They are not really competing with the broadcasters?it’s more of a, ‘Look, I was there! Look at me!’ kind of quality.
In fact, theIOC is investigating ways to incorporate more user-generated content at future Games.
We would like to be able to capture some of that … how can we invite users who have content to share that? What kind of platform can be used? How can we create something through social networking platforms? Kanah says. We encourage [licensed rights holders] to do the same.
NBC Universal, the U.S. broadcast rights holder, has ambitious plans to stream online 3500 hours of footage of the Beijing Games, and it isn’t worried about the lone cameraman purloining broadcast rights.
Unlike pirating movies, live sports events require dozens of cameras from multiple angles and a great deal of coordination.
With sports programming, it’s so complicated to produce, so difficult to get the data out there in a way that [viewers] can understand what they are seeing, says Perkins Miller, senior vice president of digital media for NBC Sports and Olympics.
Even if NBC wanted to harness user-generated content to complement its broadcast, the sheer amount of video makes the task daunting.
There’s really a tremendous amount of volume being produced already, which requires users to be able to find it easily and to be able to navigate the site, says Miller.
Targeting peer-to-peer sites
The real target of the online piracy crackdown are peer-to-peer Web sites where unauthorized video produced by the IOC or Olympics rights holders are captured and uploaded online.
The IOC, CCTV.com and NBC Universal have contracted Vobile Inc, a Californian company, to use its VideoDNA technology to help stop piracy.
Two or three years ago, to examine [online video for piracy] you had to have people comparing footage frame by frame, says Yangbin Wang, CEO of Vobile.
VideoDNA software works like biometrics for security purposes?scanning the image of the iris or a fingerprint to identify copied video online in real time.
