
Sadly this is the last Olympics that CBC will be covering for a while. That said, this is also the most well covered Olympics in CBC history. Partly thanks to the Internet and cbc.ca.
Don’t Feed The Animals
cbc.ca/olympics provides you with up to 12 online “channels” where you can watch Olympic events live. This is possible thanks to the folks in Television (specifically Web Presentation group), encoding software by Digital Rapids called StreamZ, and Akamai.
The Olympic feeds are back hauled by Television to Toronto where they are encoded by the Digital Rapids boxes. They are encoded in Windows Media v8 at 500kbps. This stream is then sent to Akamai for distribution.
In most cases the video you see are raw feeds from the venues. This means that there is no commentary. The only audio you here is ambient sounds from the event.
A lot of people like these feeds as they provide coverage for their sport even if it is not available on television.
Canada Only, Please
Due to licensing restrictions by the IOC, only Canadians are able to view Olympic coverage provided by the CBC. As such, we’ve had to use technology from Akamai to ensure that we follow the rules.
The Akamai method of “geofencing” (as we call it) is more sophisticated than what I described earlier. Multiple methods are used, some of them are:
- Your IP Address. Using a database of known IP blocks and locations.
- Which Akamai DNS server you use. When you look up a host name (like www.cbc.ca) you hit a specific Akamai DNS server. Akamai knows which DNS server is in which country and uses that information to figure out what country you’re in.
BGP Metrics. In a nutshell, Akamai looks at what other servers/routers you go through to get to the stream. If those are in the country Akamai thinks you’re in, then the confidence level goes up.
- Timezones. Using a piece of javascript on the client side. We figure out what timezone your clock is set to. If it matches with one of the timezones in the country Akamai thinks you’re in, confidence level goes up.
- We have people who watch you.
The methods listed above, plus a bunch of others combine to give a Country accuracy level of 99%.
Trends
Because of the twelve hour difference (in the Eastern Time Zone) quite a few of the events happen late at night and early the next morning.

The above graph shows the number of people watching the streams over the past seven days. The majority of the watching happens between 8pm and 12am EDT, and 6am and 12pm EDT.
Some days are more popular than others (like August 14, versus August 16). The little red arrow you see on August 19, at around 12pm EDT is when the most users were watching the streams ever.
I suspect that the closing ceremonies will generate the most streaming traffic during the Olympics.