On2 Technologies Partners With CCTV For Olympics Coverage

On2 Technologies Inc, a leading provider of video compression technologies, has announced that China's nationwide broadcasting network, CCTV, will use On2 Flix(R) Engine to encode and publish video coverage of the Beijing Olympics on its domestic web-site at: www.cctv.com.
CCTV, the official internet and mobile phone broadcaster of the 2008 games, will deliver an exclusive video on demand service using On2 VP6-based Adobe Flash video across its network of more than 1,000 servers; bringing 24/7 accessibility of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to China's internet users.
Channel 5 is spearheading the move to ON2 VP6 based Flash video for CCTV. By using On2's Flix Engine, CCTV will benefit from the latest encoding tools for the format, which deliver up to a 40% performance improvement over legacy VP6 encoders, and are particularly effective for encoding fast movement sequences characteristic to sports coverage.
Shan Xiaolei, Director of Technology Management Commission at CCTV, said: "Our bandwidth costs are very high as we need to support a large number of concurrent downloads and this will inevitably increase during the Olympics. On2 have helped us quickly address this problem by contributing the Flix Engines we need to publish our sports coverage in TrueMotion(R)-based Flash video.
By using On2 technology, CCTV is able to reduce the bandwidth needed to deliver high quality web video by as much as 40%. Following this initial collaboration, CCTV intends to expand the use of On2's solutions to deliver video across multiple screens.
Eero Kaikkonen, Chief Marketing Officer of On2 Technologies, said: "We are pleased to provide CCTV with the technologies they need to deliver a high quality VOD service in time for the Olympics. We see this as the beginning of a long term partnership that will see our two companies working together to lay the foundation of web TV in China."
Flix Engine is a leading server side platform for encoding and publishing Flash video. The On2 VP6 video compression scheme is used by many of the leading UGC sites, CDNs and content owners including Facebook, Daum, Eurosport, Akamai and Brightcove to encode all genres of video targeted for web delivery in Flash format. Coupling high quality with low datarates and supporting cue points and alpha channel in Adobe Flash, VP6 is proprietary to On2 Technologies, and as such does not bear content royalties like those levied by MPEG-LA.
Further information is available at: www.on2.com.
(KMcA)