NHL looks to Web video, mobile to further popularize game

Hockey's CTO discusses sports and technology

By Jon Brodkin, Network World
December 03, 2009 05:49 PM ET

Sports fans demand a lot more than game tickets and newspaper box scores these days – they want constantly updated game information and access to high-quality video no matter where they are. That's why the National Hockey League's technology team is on a quest to upgrade its Web and mobile video capabilities.

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"We know that we have a very tech-savvy group of fans, and we want to leverage technology to enhance the game," says Peter DelGiacco, the CTO of the National Hockey League.

The NHL's GameCenter Live lets fans watch live games, up to four at once, chat with fellow fans and view up-to-date statistics all on the same screen. But the little black puck on white ice is "a nightmare to encode" and before this season the service's video quality wasn't the greatest, DelGiacco said this week at the Gartner Data Center Conference.

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"In prior years we weren't able to deliver the same quality of video," DelGiacco said. For this season the NHL enhanced the service with high-definition video, DVR functionality, and adaptive streaming, which adjusts video quality to each user's bandwidth. As part of the same project, the NHL and its franchises redesigned all 30 team Web sites.

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"When you start watching a game, the quality starts at 400 [kilobits per second] for a few seconds, then it jumps to 800, then 1600, and it keeps going up until you say 'now that's good,'" DelGiacco said.

DelGiacco described his Web site project in a session hosted by Compuware, which provides application performance optimization tools for the NHL, and described some of his broader technology goals in an interview with Network World.
Now that the NHL has upgraded its Web browser capabilities, DelGiacco is looking toward the mobile market. "I think mobile is a big opportunity," he said.

Already, the NHL has a deal with Bell to deliver live games on mobile phones to Canadian customers, although the service involves only U.S.-based teams because of rights issues.

In the United States, the NHL has a deal with Verizon but live video isn't in the cards yet for American customers.

"We need to make sure the phones can handle that type of streaming," DelGiacco said. "Major League Baseball has done it with their product, using HTTP with the iPhone. The iPhone has that capability. Verizon has the Droids, which do not really support HTTP yet. That's a timing issue when that comes into play, if those are the phones we choose to do that on."

Most fans would rather watch a game in person or on their high-definition TVs than on a tiny mobile phone screen, of course. But the NHL is getting demand for video highlights on phones, and is already delivering video highlights and text message score alerts through a deal with Verizon, DelGiacco said.

"I think mobile is something we really want to keep an eye on," he said. "I'm not saying it's going to happen this year but ultimately, when 4G comes around that's going to change things. I think video for us on the Web this year was a big change. It really made it so you could watch really good quality video of a hockey game on the Web. I don't know when that's going to happen for the phones but it's going to happen soon, and when it does we want to make sure we're there."