NBC and Google are conducting "war games" in at least three countries, to prepare for the possibility of hacker attacks or hardware malfunction disrupting the online streaming of the Summer Olympics Games in London, which start this month.
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."
The roll-out, if successful, will represent the largest-ever online offering of a sporting event. NBC called the Beijing Olympics, which offered 2,200 hours of streaming events, a "billion dollar lab," which helped the company to innovate its sports coverage.
For example, some feared that an online broadcast would cannibalize TV viewership, said Rick Cordella, senior vice president for digital media at NBC Sports and Olympics. But NBC found that streaming online content actually created "pre-air buzz" and encouraged more people to watch a taped broadcast on television. The improvements made in the Beijing Olympics allowed NBC to stream a Super Bowl for the first time last February, reaching 2.1 million viewers.
The simulations aim to head-off disruptions as NBC, partnering with Google's YouTube, plans to offer live, online coverage of 3,500 hours of events scheduled for the end of the month, with the goal of making the summer games the most watched online event in history. "If there is a camera on it we'll stream it," Cordella said.
NBC is hoping to beat its online viewership for the Beijing Olympics, which drew around 52 million unique visitors to its site. Those viewers watched 75.5 million video streams.
NBC staff declined to talk about specific security preparations, but NBC spokesman Chris McCloskey confirmed that the war games did include preparing for the possibility of hacker attacks.
The 17-day games will be captured in London and then sent to NBC's New York and Stamford, Conn., offices, where advertising will be inserted. The footage will then go to Google's offices in San Bruno, Calif., where it will be prepped for online and streamed across the search giant's networks to several NBC sites. Cable or satellite subscribers will be able to go online to watch the entirety of the games live or in replay.
But streaming so much content–more than any other sporting event in history–presents complex risks during the high-profile games. NBC will be monitoring for unexpected traffic spikes or hardware failure. And even if a local disruption occurs as the result of an event unrelated to NBC or Google, the network knows it could still be blamed.
"One of the inherent things with streaming is there are things outside of our control," said Cordella. "Journalists and writers and guys that tweet will blame NBC but it's hard to diagnose for sure where the issue is coming from."
Analysts say it's likely that hackers will attempt to disrupt the video streams, and NBC and Google are taking steps to harden their defenses, according to the network. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security released a bulletin in May warning companies that hackers, motivated by "ideological or financial objectives," may attempt to disrupt coverage of the games.
Companies and individuals in China were subjected to 12 million hacker attacks a day during the 2008 Olympics, the report said.
As Black spoke to CIO Journal, last week, he said NBC, Google and other teams were conducting a "war game" that spanned Zurich, Switzerland; Turin, Italy; Stamford, Conn., and San Bruno, Calif. The simulation was designed to help the teams adapt if a broadcast encoder, the hardware that transfers video into a digital format for on-air broadcast, went down.
In that war game, NBC's New York office took the lead in re-routing the television feed through a back-up encoder.
Google teams in San Bruno and Zurich and NBC teams in Stamford monitored the feeds to make sure that as the encoder was changed in the midst of the war game, the hardware swap did not disrupt footage elsewhere as the video moved through the system, according to NBC. A Google spokesman declined to comment.
NBC's teams are also preparing for the remote possibility that a systems failure or bandwidth overload will overwhelm Google's ability to deliver content. NBC has contracted with other vendors to serve as alternates in that unlikely event, Black said. He declined to name those back-up vendors.
NBC and Google are also likely preparing to defend themselves against distributed denial of service attacks, in which hackers attempt to overload sites with high volumes of traffic, said John Kindervag, a security analyst with Forrester. DHS, in last month's report, singled out this method as a potential disruptor of this year's games.
The simulations would allow NBC and Google staff to see the effects such an attack would have on the network, and to calculate how quickly they could rebound, Kindervag said.
"The tests show you weak points you didn't anticipated," Kindervag said. "You make the assumption there is going to be a failure and you learn how to react."
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