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Games On The Web

By Robin Nelson
Issue date: July 1, 1996

Atlanta's Olympiad will include the first significant attempt to broadcast the Games via the World Wide Web. The official Olympics Web site is being managed by IBM, which promises live coverage of the Games. This means official event results and scores will be passed from IBM's network to the Internet simultaneously, with official release by the Olympics Committee to on-site media.

Sports devotees will be able to drill down to the vast official database. A DB2 system will let IBM servers generate Web pages in res ponse to individual queries. So everyone will be able to track the progress of their favorite teams and athletes, as well as check biographies, official rules, start times, and schedule changes.

To handle surges in Net traffic, IBM has marshaled a serious array of hardware. Its main Web location in the New York area will be installed on 45 nodes of an RS/6000 SP/2, an IBM computer system configured for parallel processing. It will be backed by 40 Gbytes of storage and linked to the Internet via two T3 lines. The combined capacity of lines plus processor will permit as many as 15,000 people simultaneously to access an average page each minute. Mirror sites in Japan and Europe are still being readied, adding as many as 125 aggregate SP/2 nodes. "Our working target total is about 10 million hits per day," says Jose-Luis Iribarren, manager of IBM's Olympic and Sports Internet Programs division.

For a visual fillip, IBM regularly will grab frames from the special broadband--so-called "Scarlet"--network tha t collects live digital video action from every venue and will have them on the Web as "Sneak Peek" images. (The site is http://www.atlanta.olympic.org/index.html )

Several other sponsors and media have mounted their own feature-rich efforts. They include:

  • AT&T ( http://www.olympic.att.com/index2.html ) will offer video frame images, refreshed at five-second intervals, taken from cameras mounted at several locations in AT&T's Global Olympic Village. AT&T also will have its own correspondents, and will provide chat access to several of its sponsored athletes.

  • NBC ( http://www.Olympics.nbc.com/ ) is the Games' U.S. TV broadcast rights-holder, and its Web site will offer a wide selection of Olympics-related audio clips. NBC also offers an easily navigated reference section on all the Olympic sports disciplin es and events.

  • The Atlanta Constitution ( http://www.atlantagames.com/index.htm ) will offer detailed, unfiltered news of local developments leading up to and during the Games; it is a "must surf" if you're going to Atlanta. It also will offer local transportation, lodging, dining, and entertainment strategies and tips, plus--worth the log-on alone--downloadable spectator seating charts for every Olympic venue are available here.

  • Sports Illustrated ( http://pathfinder.com/si/athens/olyhome.html ) has searchable Olympic articles and photos. It offers special news reports, results broken down by individual sport, an almanac, a historical timeline, and an interactive merchandise catalog.

See next story in our special report: " Weathering The Olympics "

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