It's been a long, but worthwhile, wait since the last Olympic Winter Games.
I think this year is especially exciting due to how far we've come technologically in just the last four years, let alone since I was a kid.

I remember bending rabbit ears on my 7" TV, picking up a fuzzy CTV Broadcast of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary.  Being a young hockey player and skier, I was addicted to the Winter Olympics from that moment on, and I've watched every Olympics since. 

The evolution of media delivery and consumption over that period is really remarkable, and the Vancouver games will bring more options than ever for tuning in. In the US, NBC has gone to an all-HD production for the first time.  They will be broadcasting 835 hours of content on their network.  In addition, they will be live streaming about half of that over the Internet, and providing video-on-demand replays of over 1,000 hours of events. NBC is teaming up with Microsoft to present the online streams using Smooth Streaming technology and Silverlight players, which presents an amazing step forward in video quality.

It’s been an exciting (and busy) summer at Elemental. In addition to heavy development of Elemental Server, our file-based transcoding solution, we started thinking about how to apply our GPU encoding technology to support streaming live events over the web. In today's world of adaptive bitrate streaming, live encoding solutions need to support significantly more streams than in the early days of web broadcasting.  The density of streams that we can achieve using GPUs is far beyond that of CPU-only solutions, so it’s a natural extension of our technology.

I learned a very valuable lesson while working on live encoding...never show something to a CEO that you aren't ready to show to the world.  One Friday back in July, I was playing around with an HD-SDI input card and a signal generator.  After a few hours of coding, I had a video stream of some fancy color bars being encoded in real time, and showed a few people around the office.  Sam, our CEO, caught wind of this and got so excited he said, "Hey, Jen-Hsun Huang (CEO of NVIDIA) is dropping by the office this afternoon, do you think we can have this ready to demo for him?"  In the startup world, things move fast ... but usually you get more than just a couple hours to prepare a demo for external viewing!  A few rebuilds later, Jen-Hsun showed up at Elemental world headquarters (earning cheers by bringing with him a couple cases of beer) and we were able to show off our first live H.264 stream produced on an NVIDIA GPU. Now that I'd shown this to two CEOs, there were sure to be painful repercussions ...