NBC and Google are planning for the Olympic games to be the largest-ever online offering of a sporting event. The aim is for the games to have 3 500 hours of live streaming footage. Google and NBC are staging “war games” in at least three countries to prepare for the possibility of hacker attacks or hardware malfunction.

For the past nine months the network’s online team, together with Google, have have simulated a range of problems from broken broadcast encoders to traffic overloads and hacker assaults on the systems. Some of thee scenarios have lasted up to eight hours. The simulations allow NBC and Google staff to see the effects an attack would have on the network, and to calculate how quickly they could remedy the problem without interrupting the video stream.

The numbers are huge. For the Beijing Olympics, NBC streamed 2 200 hours of sporting events, and drew around 52 million unique visitors to its site. Those viewers watched 75,5 million video streams. They hope to break those records this year. Eric Black, vice president of technology for NBC Sports and Olympics said “[a]t some point during the games there’s likely to be an outage, but the goal is for us to be on top of that and have no end-user impact.”