NBC and YouTube Stage War Games to Prep for Olympic Streams

The London Olympics will likely become the most watched sporting event in history, but that's not entirely because of TV coverage. Fans will be able to see pretty much every event, in the US at least; but it won't be on TV, it's going to be online.

NBC, who has the rights to the games in the US will be pairing up with Google (YouTube) to make available much of what's happening in London.

It plans to stream some 3,500 hours’ worth of video, that's up from about 2,200 hours during the Beijing Olympics.

The previous event, in 2008, had 52 million viewers watching some 75.5 million streams. This was in the US alone and it involved only people that paid to get NBC on TV in some form, cable or satellite.

A lot more are expected this time around, so both the NBC and Google have been staging war games for the past few months trying to prepare to all the things that can go wrong, from connection problems to hackers. Hundreds of scenarios were enacted and tested for.