NBC teams up with Microsoft for live and on-demand Olympics streaming

The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics are officially underway and, despite the misgivings of many people regarding the state of affairs at the venue, as well as in the host nation, it’s still an event many of us will tune in to watch.

In the US, that coverage comes from NBC, which yesterday released an app for Windows Phone. But the broadcasting company is doing more with Microsoft than just providing an app. It’s utilizing the software giant’s technology to run streaming and on-demand coverage.

“Through the power of cloud computing, NBC will use Windows Azure Media Services, a highly scalable video service platform hosted in Microsoft’s datacenters, to publish and stream coverage of the 2014 Sochi Winter Games”, Microsoft announces.

NBC points out that its previous coverage, which was the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, generated an average of six hours watched per day for each viewer. According the NBC Sports’ Scott Guthrie, the company expects even higher demand this time around.

“To meet that demand, Windows Azure is leading the way by providing end-to-end live streaming of the Winter Olympics entirely in the cloud, including encoding, transcoding and streaming, for the first time in history”, Guthrie comments.

Will you be watching the streaming version of Olympics, or sticking to the tried and true TV? Either way, coverage should be very good this time around.