Cisco's Cisco IP video technology and WAN acceleration gear is playing a behind-the-scenes role in one of the most watched events worldwide: the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. 

NBC is using Cisco’s IP video infrastructure and video-encoding technology to transfer multi-gigabyte files in near real-time so that NBC staff working in New York and Los Angeles can edit video after it’s captured in Beijing and ready it for delivery to TV, PC and smartphone screens.

NBC expects to present more than 3,600 hours of broadcast coverage during the 17-day Olympic Games, which wrap up on Aug. 24. Online viewers will have access to 2,200 hours of video that they can play back on demand, as well as 3,000 hours of highlights and scoring results. Smartphone users will be able to watch video and view event results as well.

In previous Olympics, NBC staff worked from videotapes to add graphics and captions to event shots. But with so many thousands of hours of coverage planned, working from tapes and duplicating video copies for use at eight different affiliate networks would have been impossible, according to Cisco. Instead, NBC is using a file-based workflow to select shots and distribute them to affiliates -- even before an event is finished. To cut back on WAN bandwidth consumption, Cisco’s video encoding technology converts high-definition video into low-resolution MPEG-4 files for editors and shot selectors in North America to review. Once their selections are made, NBC determines which high-definition video files need to be transferred to affiliates.

"With the Cisco network solution, we've achieved the Holy Grail of digital video, which is the ability to perform shot selections on low-resolution files and extract high-resolution material from those files even as they are being recorded. That is a huge accomplishment," said Craig Lau, vice president for IT at NBC Olympics, in a statement.

In a blog posting, Cisco’s Douglas Gourlay highlights the role that Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) technology plays.

Cisco WAAS effectively optimizes 35Mbps links into 140Mbps links so that editors and shot selectors in New York and Los Angeles can “access gigabyte-sized video files over the WAN with the same performance as if they were stored locally,” writes Gourlay, who is senior director of marketing and product management for Cisco’s data center business unit.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.