Elemental’s Olympic Partnership Another Win for Company

The London Olympic Games will come to a conclusion this weekend and it will mark another victory in what can easily be described as “The Summer of Elemental.”

Over the past couple of months, the multiscreen content delivery technology company continued to extend its sports presence, adding the Olympics to its other latest clients, MLB Advanced Media and the NBA.

“Sports leagues, and athletic rights holders in general, are arguably some of the most discerning customers of video infrastructure solutions,” says Keith Wymbs, Elemental’s VP, Marketing. “Elemental has spent the last two years developing the levels of quality and performance needed to own the market and be an integral part of major live and on-demand sports video applications.”

In London, Elemental has been a major technological player in what has been universally dubbed as the first “Digital Olympics.” Elemental servers have been deployed across the International Broadcast Center (IBC) to assist global broadcasters in distributing their multiscreen content. Olympic clients include the BBC in the United Kingdom, Terra in Latin America, Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium, and Eurosport. With some partnerships also existing with smaller U.S. and Japanese broadcasters, Elemental servers are currently sending Olympics video streams to nearly 70 countries.

“When we began the intense evaluation process for streaming of the Olympic Games more than a year ago, Elemental had little idea of just how broadly we’d be adopted on a global scale,” said Sam Blackman, CEO and co-founder of Elemental Technologies. “To play such an integral role in the ‘first truly digital Olympics’ is a privilege that every Elemental employee accepts with great pride.”

When all is said and done, the BBC will have streamed 2,500 hours of the Olympic Games using Elemental Live encoders as the deliver mechanism. That has helped the broadcasting rights holder provide its audience with up to 24 alternative live HD streams from which to choose. In addition, The BBC is using Elemental Live to encode and archive events that has been transitioned into video on-demand (VOD) assets.

Eurosport’s Olympics footprint extends into 50 countries where content from the Games can be accessed through the Eurosport Player service. Live streaming coverage will also be available via smartphone and tablets in 33 countries and for Panasonic Smart TV users in 38 countries. To get this done, Eurosport is using Elemental’s encoding farm, consisting of 13 Elemental Live systems, to handle 42 Eurosport live video streams.

In Latin America, Terra is streaming more than 2,000 hours of the Olympics using Elemental gear. To deliver online and connected device coverage of the games, Terra is directing incoming HD and SD fiber optics and satellite feeds into Elemental Live for video processing. That has allowed Terra to output six HD and 12 SD adaptive bit rate streams simultaneously for streaming to web and tablet/smartphone devices.

With its Olympics partnership nearing a successful conclusion, Elemental has also enjoyed recently delivered praise from some of its other major sports partners.

At SVG’s Sports Asset Management Forum last month, NBA Entertainment took industry professionals on a tour of its new Digital Media Management (DMM) complex in Secaucus, NJ.

The league’s DMM system contains a staggering 7.5 petabytes of content and continues to grow by the day as more historical video is digitized. Teams and partners have access to the full DMM library and can utilize low-res proxy courtesy of 20 Elemental Live encoders.

Also, in June at the Second Screen Summit in New York City, MLBAM senior vice president of multimedia and distribution Joe Inzerillo went on the record for the first time in praising Elemental’s work behind the scenes of baseball’s wildly successful Internet and mobile on-demand distribiution platform.

Inzerillo, who was moderating a panel that included Blackman, said, “We use a lot of your product in the on-demand space … and you guys do a really good job of it.”

Just another notable piece of praise in “The Summer of Elemental.”