Olympics Live On Internet Via Digital Rapids

The Olympic Games are to be streamed live via the Internet to a Dutch audience.
A top provider of tools and solutions for bringing television, film and web content to wider audiences, Digital Rapids has teamed up with Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS) to announce on-demand Internet and mobile coverage of the 2010 Olympic Games for audiences in the Netherlands.
The Dutch public broadcaster has selected Digital Rapids' StreamZ encoding systems to power live feed of the Games in February 12-28 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Part of Netherlands public broadcasting system Nederlandse Publieke Omroep, NOS is a market leader in the field of news and sports coverage on television, radio, the Internet and mobile devices.
NOS will supplement their television coverage of the Vancouver Olympic Games with up to eight simultaneous live streams on the Web and extensive mobile content.
The StreamZ systems will encode source video feeds into Web-friendly streams for viewing through an interactive experience powered by Microsoft Silverlight technology, and into multiple formats for mobile viewing. The encoded live streams will also be archived for viewers to watch on-demand.
"Our goal at NOS is to help strengthen the position of Dutch sports, by enabling the public to follow the many sports that play an important role in our society across all possible digital media platforms," said Roeland Stekelenburg, Head of New Media at NOS.
"During the 2008 Olympic Games, the ratio of streams viewed on our Website relative to the size of our country's population was one of the highest in the world. Digital Rapids StreamZ encoders allow us to provide the quality and reliability we need for coverage of an event of this significance."
Brick Eksten, President of Digital Rapids said he was "thrilled that NOS has again chosen our award-winning encoding systems for their online Olympic Games coverage".
He said that audience expectations for the breadth, depth and quality of online sports coverage are higher than ever: "StreamZ encoding solutions are ideal for enabling superior Web-based experiences surpassing these expectations."
The senior executive explained that StreamZ is the industry's most versatile encoding solution, delivering multi-format video capture, encoding, transcoding and live streaming in a powerful turnkey configuration that integrates easily into any professional media environment.
"Combining the quality and performance advantages of hardware-based preprocessing with a format-flexible and feature-rich software application, StreamZ seamlessly supports live and on-demand multi-platform distribution opportunities with real-time, simultaneous encoding to multiple output formats," he concluded.
See: www.digital-rapids.com
(BMcC/GK)