Behind NBC’s Olympics Website

Eric Schmidt, one of the developers on NBCOlympics.com, the official Olympics Web site for the USA, just dropped by Fast Company’s offices in New York City for a chat. We used to work together at Microsoft. I turned on my cell phone and videoed Schmidt and we talked about the site and he gave me lots of insights. Yesterday in the afternoon the site was seeing 4,000 new video plays started every second. They are still counting up all the views from yesterday, but it looks like somewhere around seven million unique visitors hit the site yesterday alone. In just a few days they’ve uploaded around 200 hours of video and are expecting to have more than 2,000 hours on the site. Four years ago there was just a few dozen hours of video up on the site. Thousands of machines are needed to encode and serve the video and the site. Interesting conversation, hope you enjoy a little look behind one of the people who worked behind the scenes for months on this site.