How Big is the Olympics Web Site?

BIG! An article on PC World begins, "How would you like to be handed this IT project: create a website that will present 2,200 hours of live, interactive video, plus integrated broadcast coverage. The site will have huge spikes of traffic, and operate under worldwide scrutiny, so it has to be designed for performance. It has to be done in the next 150 days; no schedule extensions are possible. And it must deliver a brilliant user experience."

The developers of the Summer Olympics website are extremely ambitious, wouldn't you say. That's going to be quite an accomplishment! So would you be surprised to find out that there are only 12 people writing code?

According to Matthew Rechs, CTO of Schematic, who worked with Microsoft and NBC on the site, 12 people (plus designers, managers, etc. - 25 in all) is enough. "That isn't a particularly big team, but they don't need to crank out millions of lines of code. The video site isn't an enterprise-class project with lots of business logic; it's all web services on the back end," he says.

The new site will use Silverlight technology to start, stop, rewind, pause, and replay videos of the events. A picture-in-picture feature, just like you would see on a real TV, will also be available.