China's CCTV.com to Stream Live Coverage of 2008 Olympic Games via ViewCast Technology

August 5, 2008 — CCTV.com, the online division of China Central Television (CCTV), China’s primary television broadcaster, has deployed ViewCast’s Osprey- 530 digital video capture cards with SimulStream® technology to enable live streaming of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing to the CCTV.com Web site. A product of ViewCast Corporation (OTCBB: VCST), a leading global provider of audio and video encoding communication products, the Osprey-530 cards are installed throughout CCTV.com’s broadcasting headquarters in downtown Beijing.

 

CCTV.com has been granted the exclusive rights to stream the Olympic content by the International Olympic Committee. As a longtime user of Osprey-530 cards for other mobile streaming applications, CCTV.com deployed additional cards to be used primarily for streaming Olympic content to the Web. Each Olympic event has its own dedicated Osprey-530 card, which takes the live video feed from the broadcast and processes it for encoding in all of the most common streaming formats for Internet and wireless users. The Osprey-530s were supplied by EZY-Tech, a ViewCast master distributor for Hong Kong and the mainland China.

 

“We have an excellent track record with the Osprey-530 cards, and CCTV.com chose them for streaming the Olympics not only because of their reliability and high performance, but also their ability to encode content in different formats for a variety of mobile devices simultaneously,” said Dennis Lee, Managing Director of EZY-Tech.

The Osprey-530 is designed to be a comprehensive solution for the needs of streaming media professionals. Its features include closed caption extraction from analog and Serial Digital Interface (SDI) inputs, pre-processing of video for inverse telecine and de-interlacing, and realtime bitmap overlay for branding of video. ViewCast’s Osprey® cards are ideal for delivering video to any number of encoding formats such as Windows Media®, Adobe® Flash®, H.264 and 3GPP in both narrowband and broadband streaming applications.

 

“The 2008 Olympic Games have been nicknamed ‘The Broadband Olympics,’ and with good reason. Sports fans worldwide will be able to watch live coverage of their favorite events from any location, and on a variety of mobile devices — and advanced streaming technology makes it possible,” said Gary J. Klembara, ViewCast’s senior vice president of sales. “Since the CCTV.com audience is so huge — one of the world’s largest TV viewing audiences — we’re pleased with the role ViewCast is playing to deliver all the action to such a significant percentage of viewers.”