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China's CCTV.com to Use On2 Technologies to Deliver Olympic Video Coverage

By Rajani Baburajan, TMCnet Contributing Editor

On2 Technologies, a company that develops advanced video compression technologies, today announced a partnership with CCTV.com, the new media service platform of China Central Television (CCTV), to use On2 technology to encode and publish video coverage of Beijing Olympics on the Web.

 

As per the agreement, CCTV.com will use On2 Flix Engine, a server-side platform, to encode and publish video coverage of the entire Olympics.

 

CCTV.com is the official Internet and mobile phone broadcaster of the 2008 Olympics games. CCTV.com will deliver exclusive video on demand (VOD) service using On2 VP6-based Adobe Flash video, said the official announcement from On2 Technologies (News - Alert).

 

The service will be available to CCTV’s network consisting of more than 1000 servers in China.

 

According to On2 officials, the latest encoding tools available for the On2 Fix Engine will enable CCTV.com to deliver up to 40 percent performance improvement over legacy VP6 encoders. On2 Fix Engine is highly effective for encoding fast video sequences characteristic of sports event coverage.

 

On2 technology also enables CCTV.com to reduce bandwidth required for the delivery of Web video. On2 claims that CCTV.com can reduce the bandwidth by about 40 percent. Using this technology, CCTV plans to further expand its video coverage across multiple screens.

 

“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,” said Shan Xiaolei, director, technology management commission, CCTV.com, in a statement. “On2 has helped us quickly address this problem by contributing the Flix Engines we need to publish our sports coverage in TrueMotion-based Flash video,” added Xiaolei.

 

Eero Kaikkonen, chief marketing officer, On2 Technologies, said, “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.”

 

On2 VP6 video compression scheme is currently being used by many user-generated content (UGC) Web sites, including Facebook (News - Alert), Akamai, Daum, and Eurosport.

 

CCTV.com signed an agreement with the International Olympics Committee in December 2007 for new media broadcasting rights for Beijing Olympics and became the first official Internet and mobile phone broadcaster in Olympic history. CCTV.com is the only organization that can authorize others to air CCTV’s content online. It has the full network broadcasting license in China for Web TV, mobile TV and Internet Protocol TV (IPTV (News - Alert)).

 

Rajani Baburajan is a TMCnet contributing editor.