NBC's Tour de France app -- three stars and five suggestions

NBC is learning how to present live sporting events on the Internet, but still has a way to go.

I've been commenting on the online coverage of the Tour de France and the Olympic Games for several years. The BBC and IT4 in England have done a better job than NBC, but NBC is improving their sporting event coverage and I enjoyed this year's Tour using their iPad app. (They also have Web and Android versions).

Let's look at the app. The user interface has five modes -- live video, standings, stages, riders and more:

Five viewer modes

You spend most of your time in the four-frame live video mode:

The four-frame live video user interface

Live video is shown in the upper left, and one can toggle the video to full screen. The text column on the right has frames showing the peloton and other rider groups and a curated, Twitter-like news feed. The graphic frame at the bottom has five optional modes, as shown here:

Options for the bottom window

The user can zoom or pan the bottom frame, as shown here:

Bottom window zooms and pans

The text windows on the right scroll and nearly every object on the screen is a hot link. For example, touching the word Peloton below popped up a scrollable list of the names of the riders in the peloton. Touching the rider's name, would bring up data about him.

Most objects are hot links.

I spend most of my time watching live video, but frequently switch to one of the other modes to check the standings or to see how a particular rider, team or nation is doing.

The stages mode is most interesting. It has facts about each stage and, more important, archives of the completed stages. Shortly after a stage is completed, you can go back and watch highlight clips or the video of the entire stage and review the standings and other statistics.

Finally, The biggest improvement over last year was not in the data presentation or user interface, but in NBC's offer -- I paid $14.99 and there were no commercials!

Suggestions for next year

The viewing experience was better than last year, but I'd still like to see several improvements.

1. As we saw above, the live presentation consists of a video stream and three data panes. The data panes and video are synchronized as long as you watch it in real time. If you pause the video for a short time, it "fast forwards" to the current live point, where it is in synch with the ancillary data. But, if you pause for a relatively long time -- maybe half an hour or an hour -- the video resumes where you left off, but the data stream reflects the current state of the race so they are out of synch.

Check the following screen shot. The riders in the video pane are climbing a steep mountain, but the course-progress pane at the bottom of the screen shows them on the subsequent descent (blue). The text on the right is synchronized with the course-progress map, so it is also out of synch with the video.

The video and ancillary (bottom and right hand) material are out of synch.

After pausing, you should have the option of picking up where you left off or jumping to the current point in the race. Either way, the video and ancillary material should remain in synch.

2. A complete archive copy of the video of a stage is posted shortly after it ends. That is good, but the ancillary material -- group positions and news posts -- is not available. Viewing the archive video is like watching a TV broadcast -- not an Internet performance. They should archive the synchronized data stream along with the video.

3. While watching the live stream or an archive stream, I'd like to have a single-touch, 15-second video rewind, as in the UK ITV4 viewer.

4. Similarly, I would like to be able to jump to the start of a video "chapter" with a single click or tap as you could with the BBC's player from the 2012 Olympic Games. A chapter might be something like the finals of the 100 meter dash in the Olympics or the sprint to the top of a mountain during the Tour de France. The person who is maintaining the ancillary news feed would create the chapter entry points as they posted the news updates.

5. The tablet interface is suitable for "leaning forward" -- switching modes and looking things up, but the small screen in your hands or lap is not so great for just "leaning back" and watching the race. I want to be able to mirror the video on my TV screen with a single touch.

I was watching on an iPad, so could have done that if my TV set were equipped with an Apple TV interface device. I don't have an Apple TV, but I do have a Google Chromecast, and Google just announced the ability to mirror the screen of selected Android phones and tablets on a Chromecast-equipped TV set. The updated Chromecast app is labeled "beta," and it took me two reboots to get it to work, but as you see here, I can now cast my phone video to my TV set:

Mirroring a phone on a Chromecast-enabled TV set

(This video is not from the NBC app because I have that installed on an iPad, not my phone).

The video quality is good, though not excellent. The imperfection is most noticeable on text which is part of the video stream -- it is a little blurry around the edges. Static text looks fine from across the room. Chromecast mirroring works if you have a compatible phone or tablet, but, hopefully by next year, NBC will Chromecast enable their app, allowing for switching between leaning forward to display data, post tweets, etc and leaning back to watch the race on a TV screen.

At first, new media mimic old media and NBC's earlier attempts at covering live sporting events online was shaped by their traditional TV coverage -- shoot video and insert commercials. This year, they have developed good ancillary data capability to go along with their video and dropped the commercials for a flat fee. Once they get the video and data synchronized and archived and I can lean back and watch the video or lean forward and play with the data, I'll give them five stars.

Review of online coverage of the 2013 Tour de France from NBC and ITV4 (UK)

I watched the Tour de France online again this year. (My reporting on the Tour from last year). In order to compare NBC's coverage in the US with that of French ITV4, I subscribed to NBC's US coverage ($29) and also watched ITV4 via an English proxy server. Both used the same video feed, but differed in several ways -- lets's look at some of the main differences.

Video players and interaction

The NBC player ran in its own Silverlight window as shown here:

Zooming in on the controls, we see (from left to right) that the user can share a link on Facebook, Twitter, etc., adjust the speaker volume, rewind 15 seconds with a single click, see how far behind the live stream they are on the timeline, jump to the live stream, reveal running commentary (tweets) and links to highlight videos and go full screen.

I preferred to leave the running commentary and links to highlights hidden, but here is a screen shot with them revealed:

NBC used what seemed to be the same player in the 2012 Tour de France, and you can see a more complete description here.

The NBC experience was far better and more interactive than that of ITV4. ITV4 emulated watching TV, merely displaying a live video stream inside a Web page. As you see in this screen shot, the user could only stop/watch the live stream, adjust the volume or toggle between full screen and windowed mode.

NBC clearly has a better, interactive video player.  It may be that ITV4 just streamed the live stream because there was a large fee for the right to archive it.

Streaming performance

My laptop has 8GB of memory and a solid state drive and my cable service is typically 15 Gbps, but my three year old CPU/graphic controller is not up to the task of watching full screen video on a TV set, so I did most of my watching on the laptop screen.

When I tried to go to full screen on a TV set, the CPU fell steadily behind, whether I was watching NBC or ITV4 or using Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer.  NBC would begin at its maximum speed of 2.5 Mbps, but it would automatically step down to 350 Kbps, then start dropping frames.   ITV4 did not display their speeds, but they seemed to be about the same and the results were also the same.

This is a temporary issue.  A fast laptop would probably be able to keep up with either and future versions of the player software will be more efficient.

Current status presentation

As shown here, ITV4 provided a nice race status display below the video window. Scrolling down further, you saw the overall standings and standings within categories like mountain climbing and sprinting.  It was convenient and easy to access.

Since the NBC player runs in a separate window, one had to open the video player and a Web browser side by side, as shown here, to achieve the same functionality.

Aligning and sizing the two windows was a bit of a bother.  Since one could scroll down and see pretty much the same current status information on both, I'll give ITV4 the edge in convenience.

Ancillary content and archives

NBC had a lot more ancillary content than ITV4.  They had more prepared material and, since they archived the video, a much richer selection of replays.  Ancillary content was organized as shown in the tabs below.  For example, the Track tab showed the positions of the groups of riders on the course on a Google map.  

NBC easily wins the archive comparison. They saved preview videos and full stage replays for each stage along with 213 stage highlight videos and 37 historical and human interest "tour extra" videos. ITV4 archived only a three minute highlight of each stage and ten short tour extras.  

That is the good news on NBC. The bad news is that they deleted last year's archive shortly after the race and will probably do the same this year. The BBC and NBC also deleted their 2012 Olympic archives.

Amazon taught us the value of "long tail" content years ago, but these guys don't get it. The cost of keeping an event archive online is very small and they are erasing history.

I guess it comes down to money -- couldn't they cover the the costs with ads or access fees? Perhaps the problem lies with the Tour organizers.  I assume NBC had to pay a fee for the right to archive the live stream, which was used to provide the ancillary material and the interactive player described above.  If that is the case, the Tour should keep the archives online.

Advertising

ITV4 drove me nuts with commercials.  (Since I cut the cord a few years ago, I have really come to hate commercials).  You see the same ads every time you load their Web site.  I was surprised to see that the Nintendo Wii was a major sponsor in Europe, but I really got tired of seeing the same stupid ad.

But, that was minor compared to their commercial breaks during slow times in the race.  I counted one time -- they ran nine straight commercials without a stop, which seemed interminable.  (Since both NBC and ITV4 share a video stream, NBC cut to historical or informative videos during the long commercial breaks).

NBC had fewer ads.  Like ITV4, they played two commercials when you first came to the site.  One was a Microsoft ad favorably comparing a Surface tablet to an iPad.  It made the Surface look good, but, after seeing the same ad over and over, it became an irritant.

NBC also had banner ads above the video screen at times, but they were less obtrusive and frequently turned off.  I hardly noticed them, which also makes me wonder how effective they are.

The ads were much easier to take on NBC, but they were irritating, especially so in view of the fact that NBC charged $29 for the event.

That's my summary of the experience.  It is clear that both the technology and the business model are evolving, but the bottom line for me is that I prefer to pay NBC $29 to reduce the number of commercials and to get interactivity and archiving.  Being able to pause, have breakfast and resume where I had left off was enough to sell me.

The Olympic live stream -- observations, recommendations and predictions

I watched the Tour de France and the Olympic Games (from both NBC and BBC) online this year. I'm a sports fan, but I also spent a lot of time focusing on the Internet content and experience. You can see my detailed observations here.

For this, the short version, I will list a few observations and conclude with some predictions for the future of live-event coverage on the Internet. First the observations, in no particular order.

• There were examples of three sources of revenue for live streaming of events: the BBC's coverage of the Olympics (free with a license fee), NBC's coverage of the Tour de France (pay per view) and NBC's Olympic coverage (advertising). My favorite was pay-per-view, but there is a lot of room for improving NBC's advertising presentation and many people would rather pay by watching ads.
• The BBC's Internet coverage was better than NBC's. It was more interactive, had better video quality and commentary and no advertsing. BBC also has a terrific sports blog. They win the gold medal because the viewers are their customers while NBC's customers are their advertisers. BBC "gets" the Internet.
• NBC could learn something about Web design from BBC. The BBC Web site was more interactive, giving the user control, while NBC's more closely followed a passive television model. They also need to clean up glitches like broken links.
• NBC's Olympic coverage needed better direction -- adding expert commentary to all the streams, better timing of commercials and intelligent camera selection.
• Sadly, NBC deleted the archives of the Tour de France soon after end of the race. I believe they have an information stewardship obligation and should maintain the archives of important events for analysis by journalists, scholars, fans, remixers, etc. The cost of doing so would be low.
• NBC's Olympic archive is still online, but they have not said for how long. Since it contains ads, they may leave it up. The BBC archive will remain online until January.
• NBC allowed viewers to watch two streams at once (one in a larger window), but then they had to watch two streams of ads.
• The quality of NBC's Web stream was very poor at first, virtually unwatchable. The video quality using their phone and tablet apps was much better. The video quality of NBC's earlier streaming of the Tour de France was nearly as good as that on television.
• NBC's Web video quality seemed to improve during the Olympic games. I did a subjective evaluation on day nine and, while it was far from perfect, it was in the same ballpark as BBC's streaming coverage. (Note that I watched the BBC coverage using a proxy server, which limited my download speed to about 2.3 Mbps while I was getting around 15 Mbps when accessing NBC).
• NBC's video seemed to improve even further by the end of The Games. Looking at various performance tests during the games, I tentatively concluded that the bottleneck was in the network, although there are too many variables to be sure.
• NBC made changes to their user interface during the Olympics. They were acting a bit like an agile Internet start-up -- release early, revise often -- tweaking the network to improve performance and revising the user interface.
• The Olympic Organizing Committee did its best to control leaks of Olympic material. For example, WiFi hotspots were not allowed in the stands and they did their best to stop social media leaks.
• NBC did a much better job on the Tour de France than the Olympics, but it was an easier event to cover, they had experience covering it in past years and they did not have to deal with the presentation of ads.

Now for a few fearless predictions.

NBC paid the International Olympic Committee $4.38 billion for the media rights to 2014 - 2020 Summer and Winter Olympics. We will see major changes in the coverage and the industry by 2020.

There will two separate markets. The first will be for producing content -- video, commentary, interactive features, Web design, and so forth. NBC was the content producer in this case. The second market will be for efficient networking to distribute that content. During these Olympics YouTube (Google) provided the networking expertise.

Both the content producers and the networkers will have learned a lot from past experience and will do a much better job than they did this year. We have even seen improvement during these Olympics. This is just the start of the IP TV era -- it is like the crystal set era in the early days of radio.

Given the expected improvement, the majority of people will be watching live events and other video on the Internet by 2020 -- we will have cut the cord and be watching over the top.

While there will be both network and content industries, the content industries will not have a lock on production. As the comedian Louis C. K. showed us, the production company will be dropped in some cases. Louis C. K. decided that he could do a better job of producing his comedy DVDs than Sony, and the Internatinal Olympic Committee might decide that it can do a better job than NBC or another production company.

It will be interesting to see what Google does in this area. If their fiber pilot study in Kansas City looks promising and replicable, they may become a networking powerhouse. At the same time, they are developing content and learning by working with folks like NBC. They may end up being able to offer the whole package.

Of course, there is a disclaimer to these predictions -- never underestimate the power of well-funded, entrenched lobbyists and huge corporate legal staffs. On the other hand, it is hard to find good buggy whips these days.

Three revenue models for online coverage of live events

With the Olympics and Tour de France, we saw examples of three live streaming revenue models: license fee, advertising and pay per view. Here is a quick look at each.

BBC Olympics, license fee

The BBC streamed 2,500 hours of free, live coverage, but you had to have a British TV license. The TV licenses cost £145.50 per year for a color TV and £49.00 for a black and white TV. The fee allowed you to watch the video streams on any device and gave you permission to store, but not distribute, the content. If you came to the site from a non-British IP address, you were blocked, but that was easily circumvented using proxy servers. In the future, they may be more aggressive about discovering and blocking proxy servers.

Archived footage will be available until January.

NBC Olympics, advertising supported

To view their live coverage of the Olympics, NBC required you to have a cable TV account with an authorized provider and a subscription level with access to several NBC cable channels. (That restriction may have been imposed by NBC's owner, Comcast). On top of that, they showed a lot of ads.

Like the BBC, authorized users were free to view the live coverage on the Web or their tablets and phones. One could circumvent the account restrictions by using the user name and password of a friend with a qualifying account. Again, in the future they might be more aggressive in blockng that sort of access.

NBC's archives are on line at this time, but they have not announced their plans for future access. Since they run ads, they may leave them up indefinitely.

NBC Tour de France, pay per view

For the Tour de France, NBC charged a $29 fee, which, as with the other events, entitled the user to watch on the Web, a phone or tablet. There were no ads, but, unfortunately, access to the archive footage was dropped shortly after the end of the event.

My least favorite this year was the ad support model, which was done poorly. When navigating the Web site, it seemed that every new page view had a pre-roll commercial, and arbitrary commercial breaks in the middle of event coverage were irritating and distracting -- the screen would go black for a few seconds in the middle of an event, then they would run as many as six commercials before resuming the action. To add insult to injury, they boosted the audio volume during commercials.

I preferred pay per view, but many viewers would opt for ads, and there is a lot of room for improving the experience. For a start, NBC needs directors to watch the action and insert ads intelligently. Ad targeting -- showing individuals ads based on demographic, social networking and search signals or asking them for hints as to the kinds of ads they were interested in -- would also improve the experience. There could be hybrid models like allowing the user to choose between pay per view with no ads and paying a smaller fee and seeing just a few, well-placed ads.

NBC blows it -- deletes the Tour de France archive

All that is left at the Tour de France Web site.

During their coverage of the Tour de France, NBC created a terrific archive of 261 videos of interviews, highlights, full-stage replays, commentary, etc. on the Tour Web site.

I just went back to the site, and discovered that the archive is gone. That is a shame, because it would have been a valuable resource for historians, journalists, fans and remixiers.

What a waste. Doesn't NBC get the Internet? Haven't they noticed Amazon's success with low-selling, long tail books and other retail items?

They need to talk with Brewster Kahle, who founded the Internet Archive to build an Internet library to offer "permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format."

In endorsing the Internet Archive, Stewart Brand wrote that "civilization is developing severe amnesia" due to the rapid turnover of digitized information, that the archiving "norm is total loss."

NBC -- how many early TV video tapes and kinescope recordings have you lost? Don't keep repeat your past mistakes.

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Added notes: NBC's Olympic archive is still online, but they have not said how long it will remain there. The BBC Olympic archive (up to 24 live HD streams and 2,500 hours of coverage) will be available until January.

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I just learned that the January date was not decided by the BBC, but imposed in their contract with the International Olympic Committee (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2012/08/digital_olympics_reach_stream_stats.html?postId=113427062#comment_113427062).

I understand that one can argue that the IOC paid a lot of money and should have the right to maximize their profit on that investment, but I also feel that there is a class of event that should be kept available as part of our cultural and political history for which there is a stewardship responsibility. Do not know where to draw the line, but in this case, I would urge the IOC to plan on keeping the archive available to the public and adjusting the terms of their contract to take that into account.

Thumbs up for NBCs coverage of the Tour de France

I've watched the Tour de France for years on television, but earlier this year, I cut the cord -- gave up my cable TV subscription -- and started streaming my video entertainment online. Since I could no longer get live television coverage, I paid NBC $29 for ala carte access to their 21 day online coverage of The Tour.

The bottom line -- I loved it. Let me list some of the things I liked.

In past years, I had to get up around 5 AM to watch coverage. NBC streamed The Tour live, but they buffered it online, so, if I got up late, I could still watch from the start. As soon as a stage finished, they archived it, so I could watch it later in the day if I was unable to watch live.

Since the real time video coverage was buffered, I could pause, fast forward, etc. My favorite feature here was a single click button to back up 15 seconds. Want to replay the last minute? Four quick clicks do the trick.

Since NBC charged for access, they kept the advertising reasonable. There were some banner ads, but no traditional 30 or 60 second video spots like on television. In full-screen mode, there were no banner ads at all.

There were three viewing modes -- full screen and two windowed modes, expand and reveal.

Here we see the full screen mode, with only narrow logo across the top:

This is the expand windowed mode with banner ads at the top of the screen:

The reveal windowed mode adds extra information like running commentary and links to highlight videos:

The windowed modes had ads, but they did not really bother me. The greater distraction in a windowed mode is the temptation to click away and read your email or do some other work. While I did my share of that, full screen is the mode for sitting back and passively watching.

You could also switch to the NBC Web site to track live race progress and get information on the riders, teams, and standings as well as see interviews, video, news, photos and dynamic stage maps like the one shown here:

Dynamic information on the progress of the race also popped up from time to time, as shown below. The popup in this example conveys a lot of information -- there are 30.9 kilometers remaining in this stage and the race leader, in the yellow jersey, is 8 minutes and 21 seconds behind the leaders, who are shown. There is a pursuit group 53 seconds behind the leading group, and last year's winner, Cadel Evans, is 10 minutes 3 seconds behind the leaders. (Click the image to enlarge it).

These popups were not distracting, and, in fact, I would have liked to be able to display them on demand. (That would probably not be possible since they can only be computed when the riders pass fixed observation points on the road).

The race is over now, but an archive of 261 videos remains on the NBC Web site -- full stage replays, highlights of stages, pre and post stage analysis, interviews of riders, etc.

This video material, along with the other archived extras, is a treasure trove of material for sports historians, journalists, fans and re-mixers. I hope NBC leaves it there forever, but, when I asked them what they planned to do with the material, I got no answer.

I will finish where I started -- this was terrific coverage of a live sporting event -- a win for cord cutters.

Tour de France -- toward historical archives

Today is a rest day for the Tour de France riders, but what about fans? If you are watching the Tour online, you now have access to over 100 videos -- full stage replays, interviews, commentary, highlights, crash reels, etc.

At this rate, there will be over 200 videos by the end of the race. I do not know how long NBC will leave them online or whether someone will archive them (legally or illegally), but this is the sort of archive documentation future sports fans can look forward to. (I assume the footage is all copyrighted, which is fair even if the duration of the copyright is unreasonable).

NBC will also be streaming the upcoming Olympic Games. If this stuff remains available, it will be a treasure trove for fans, journalists, researchers, data miners and re-mixers. We are at the start of a new historical archiving era, and that includes sporting events as well as political and cultural events. (For an early example of the archiving of historical political data, see this account of the 1991 Soviet Coup attempt and its traffic archive).

During the Tour, the online coverage is only available in the US and the Olympic coverage will only be available to those who already subscribe to a cable, satellite or telco video tier that includes CNBC and MSNBC. After the events, the archive could be opened to all, with the cost covered by a reasonable access fee. Well, I hope that happens, but am not optimistic. Maybe NBC will surprise me.

While there is plenty of archive material to keep Tour de France fans busy on this rest day, one thing is missing -- Bob Roll and his commentaries. As you see above, he is still commenting during the broadcast coverage, but I have not seen him online. NBC -- let's get Bob Roll on the video site!