Photo: london2012.com.
The WSJ's Joel Schectman reports that NBC and Google are conducting “war games” in at least three countries, in preparation for possible hacker attacks or hardware screwups that could interrupt web streaming of the 2012 Summer Olympics Games in London, which begin this month.
The planned online streaming, if successful, will be the largest-ever online offering of a sports event.
For the past nine months the network’s online team, together with Google, which is managing the streaming of the games, have simulated hundreds of disruptive scenarios, some lasting eight hours. They have simulated a range of problems from broken broadcast encoders to traffic overloads and hacker assaults on the systems, NBC staff told CIO Journal.
“We have it very well-scripted, so we know that when a problem occurs who is on point and what steps we need to take,” said Eric Black, vice president of technology for NBC Sports and Olympics. “At some point during the games there’s likely to be an outage, but the goal is for us to be on top of that and have no end-user impact.”
Read more: NBC, Google, Stage “War Games” To Prepare for London Olympic Disruptions.
