IN MY VIEW: From carrier pigeons to satellites

As you are no doubt directly aware, these days it is entirely possible to break down a text message or photo into a series of digital characters (known as bits), transmit these bits via cable or microwave, and regenerate the message into a reasonable facsimile of the original document. We can’t yet do the same for living people and transubstantiation seems about as likely as finding life on Mars. But we have come a long way in that latter effort.

A step in that direction was exemplified by the recent activities during the 2012 London Summer Olympic games in attempts to offer full television coverage of all the events and the participants in a timely fashion. As the host city of the 2012 Olympics, London was expected to break new, innovative ground in the introduction of novel systems for individuals and athletes, referees and umpires alike.

And so it was for all concerned in the “front-of-the-house” activities for the indoor stadiums, gymnasium setups, swimming and diving pools, and outdoor tracks. But not all of these innovations worked as they were intended and the new systems were slow to appear. One might say, as Hitler’s minions reportedly claimed, that the Berlin 1936 games were the first public television showings. In fact, the system used about a dozen cameras in a fixed closed-circuit setup.

The 1948 Games marked the first time the BBC had to pay a broadcast rights fee (1000 guineas!). The BBC’s coverage totaled about 60 hours and transmission was limited to those within a 50-mile radius of the center of London. Clearly, the Internet and its World Wide Web were still only a dream for the researchers at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.

In fact, the US broadcast networks initially totally ignored the streaming possibilities of computer networks. At the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic games, the only live feed was for a single ice hockey match. Still glacially slow to move in changing to new technologies and games for the Olympiad, the International Olympics Committee (IOC) is in danger of becoming obsolete, in my view.

Now NBC is acting like it just discovered streaming media while my view is that the big television stations and the national networks are on the way to total fiscal collapse if they don’t learn how to use streaming media—and fast. They may already be too late to climb on the streaming media bandwagon. The BBC’s marathon coverage produced more than 2500 hours of live feeds during the two weeks of the London Olympic Games.

According to a BBC executive, in the first week of the London Games, more than 45 million Britons had tuned in to at least 15 minutes of Olympics coverage. The BBC web site reached a peak audience of 8 million and had 29 million requests for its interactive videos. There can be no doubt that streaming media is alive and well—at least in the United Kingdom—according to these statistics.

By contrast, NBC’s coverage was largely tape-delayed for showing in prime time. I for one got a surfeit of water polo, women’s beach volleyball, and other events delayed to suit the NBC advertisers. Traditional events, such as Greco-Roman wrestling, were almost completely ignored. I’ll be happy if I never see a women’s beach volleyball event again.

The BBC also offered a number of 3-D channels—which I was unable to view since I do not possess a television set with 3-D capability. HDTV sets with a good cable or satellite connection are fine for me. NHK, the Japanese public broadcaster, is working with the BBC to produce a new technology claiming to offer 16 times the resolution of conventional HDTV. That’s all very well—but I don’t see a revolution in resolution.