Adobe Flash Delivers Olympics for CCTV.com

By Andrew Lippe

Adobe Flash is fueling the Chinese population’s need for online video of the Beijing Olympics and CCTV.com is streaming 5,000 hours of video content via Adobe Flash. CCTV.com distributes content to mainland China and Macau and is streaming 3,800 hours of broadcast content from the IOC and BOB and 1,200 hours of CCTV.com original content.

“At CCTV.com, we have focused our vision on using dynamic Internet and video technologies, and we believe that Adobe Flash technology provides a compelling online video experience in the Web 2.0 era,” says Steven Shan, Director of Technical Management at CCTV.com. “As a result of this partnership, we believe that our online users will experience the best possible Olympic viewing experience on the Web.”

CCTV.com will include results, statistics, bios, rules and expert analysis from CCTV’s Olympic media team. CCTV built its Olympics website using Adobe Flex builder technology.

“We use Adobe Flex Builder 3 to design and develop the whole CCTV Olympics site and mash up data from various sources,” adds Shan. The Flex Builder toolset helps create Internet applications that enable data sharing and the creation of social networks on the site.

Video streams from IOC and BOB are encoded by the CCTV.com production team and streamed to CCTV.com’s own Adobe Flash media server. ChinaCache and 21Vianet deliver the VOD content for CCTV.com. Live video is delivered by CCTV’s own peer-to-peer network.

The advantage of Adobe Flash is backwards compatibility. “You don’t have to have the latest PC with the latest operating system to have a great experience with Flash,” says Jim Guerard, vice president and general manager of Dynamic Media for Adobe. “Adobe Flash gives great playback and great performance at slower bandwidth connections and plays on older machines and older operating systems.” Adobe Flash players run seamlessly and smoothly on Windows, on Macs and Linux PC’s.

“I am psyched for the possibilities here,” adds Guerard “The population in the US is 300 hundred million. The population in China is 1.3 billion. So it is entirely conceivable that more people will watch the Olympics from in Adobe Flash video, then the entire U.S. population.”