Media Wonk

Olympic gold for U.S. digital firms - August 6, 2008

The Opening Ceremonies are yet to kick off but the Beijing Olympics, which begin this Friday, is already turning into a gold rush for U.S. digital technology firms thanks to China Central Television's (CCTV) ambitious live streaming plans for the games. The official Chinese broadcast network, which has exclusive online and mobile streaming rights to the games throughout the Middle Kingdom, has tapped North American technology providers for everything from real-time encoding to media players to digital-rights management. For the companies involved, it's an opportunity not just to be involved in a high-profile event such as the Olympics but to forge potentially valuable long-term ties to Chinese broadcasters.

Among the deals announced this week:

Digital Rapids: Ontario, Canada-based Digital Rapids will provide encoding, streaming and content management systems to support CCTV's live streaming. CCTV will deploy 100 DRC-Stream encoding and streaming systems will be used to capture and encode video feeds from the games into live web streams for CCTV.com and partner Web site. The full press release is available here.

SafeNet: Baltimore, Maryland-based SafeNet Inc. has been tapped to provide the digital rights management system to protect CCTV content against unauthorized redistribution. After successfully testing its copy-protection system on CCTV's streamed coverage of the European soccer championships in June, SafeNet will now be used to protect all live-stream and on-demand Olympics content. Full details are available in the press release here.

ArcSoft: Fremont, Calif.-based ArcSoft will provide the media player CCTV will use for its streamed coverage of the games. ArcSoft's TotalMedia Theater Net Edition player supports IP region identification and restrictions and HD resolution. The full press release is available here.

ViewCast: CCTV will rely on Plano, Texas-based ViewCast's Osprey-530 video capture cards to capture the live streams from each event and process them for encoding in multiple formats. The full press release is here.

Adobe: CCTV.com's online Olympic Network TV Station will be based on San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe's Flash and Adobe Flex platforms. In addition to the Olympics, the "strategic partnership" announced between CCTV and Adobe this week includes pursuing "other initiatives to develop new media based applications leveraging CCTV.com's brand and content and Adobe's advanced technology platform." The full press release is here.

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