World’s biggest Olympics streaming project uses Flash
CCTV in China is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) television broadcasters in the world. They also own the online video rights to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games for mainland China and Macau. That’s over 200 million potential online viewers making this by far the world’s biggest Olympics streaming project. Next to the 3800 hours of pure Olympics coverage, they will make an additional 1200 hours of own Olympics-related content including full event replays, highlights, features, interviews and encore packages. That’s a massive 5000 hours of Olympics content available to more than 200 million users! To deliver all this content in an engaging and hassle-free application, they picked Flash and Flex to get the job done.
The application itself not only features a massive library of online video but it also has live Olympic results, statistics, comprehensive bios, rules and expert analysis from CCTV’s Olympic media team, as well as social networking features that will enable fans to share aspects of their Olympic experience with friends.
Perhaps with this project the myth around Flash and Flash video not being able to handle large-scale projects is finally busted.
Links:
http://www.cctvolympics.com/
Adobe press release
UPDATE: Additionally, the IOC announced that it will launch an online channel to broadcast the Olympics to 77 territories. The video-on-demand channel will be available on YouTube meaning that the official Olympics channel is also using Flash technology.
15 Comments
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
- Gilbert Corrales - quick before bed: looks like Silverlight will have an opponent on Olympics experience after all check this out from CCTV ...
- The Universal Desktop mobile edition - [...] we approach the Olympics we’re seeing a lot of different experiences being created around video content. I was recently ...
Feel free to follow me on: 
Looks neat–when I run it first it tells me (well my Mandarin’s more than rusty) to use IE… then it wants to install some pretty scary plugins.
Is it actually Flash video getting streamed? Not saying it isn’t but I can’t see it run.
Hey Philip,
It didn’t ask me to install anything… and I’m running this on Firefox 3 on a Mac.
The videos are geo-locked to China so you would actually have to be in China to watch this… And yes… It is Flash video!
Serge
Looks like a great lead for u guys at Adobe, now there will be a good comparison opponent to NBC’s Silverlight-based Olympic experience.
Let the best experience prevail!!
Also in the UK the BBC are covering the Olympics on their iplayer using flash…
Great article about how CCTV.com is streaming, but you should also include that in addition to using the Flash/Flex platform from Adobe, they are using On2 Flix Engines to encode the video across their 1,000 servers with the main reason being a massive bandwidth savings.
Could you also include the link to On2′s press release in that article too?
Link: http://www.on2.com/index.php?id=439&news_id=633
Well, the UI is obviously Flash. So are the ads. But, are you personally sure that the video is Flash? I did a bit of hacking around and found that it seems to want to play the vids through a p2p activex control called “KooPlayer”. Also, all the playback controls are handled through javascript–regular html stuff calling SetVolume() on the KooPlayer instance. I’m not saying you’re wrong–but I’m not convinced either.
You have more info on this?
Btw, don’t worry–I’ll be sure to make sure I totally understand the NBC olympics video technology when that rolls out in a few days.
Congrats to Adobe !! that is will make competition to NBC ?s Olympic based on Silverlight .
I’m not sure if we in the US would see what people in China would see… there’s an incredible amount of geo-restriction going on with all the Olympics video delivery.
(There’s also the different viewing options, live, asynchronous, stream, download, data-overlay, mobile… hard to be sure we’re on the same, uh page. ;-)
There was a press release two weeks ago about China using some type of peer-to-peer networks for delivery as well, so there could be an additional third-party dependency. CCTV’s general manager is quoted in the press release, but I don’t know of deeper articles yet.
(And Scott, I’m guessing you’re long on the Yahoo On2 board…? ;-)
jd/adobe
I wouldn’t want to suggest that the claim there’s Flash video is completely fabricated–but I have also seen no proof. In my opinion lots of folks are making very vague claims and while there’s a ton of video content for the Olympics I guess that leaves plenty of room for misstatements.
I think my request for Serge to say if he knows personally that they’re using FLV still stands unanswered.
If anyone has proof that it’s Flash I’d just like to see it– my tests have shown many other forms of video on that site. I understand the geo locking stuff. But, still… you all should be able to back up the press release.
Hey Philip,
Sorry I didn’t get back to you on this earlier but I am currently on the road and the only working Internet connection is my phone’s.
I asked the team involved with CCTV about this and they told me that that KooPlayer is used for their live broadcasts. Flash is used for all on demand video.
Hope that clears things up.
So… what technology is being used for live broadcasts?
And… not that this is terribly important to me… but according to your “200 million” link, the Chinese internet audience is smaller than the US. Just saying–if you’re going to say it’s “by far the world’s biggest” project.
@Philip: They are using a proprietary P2P solution for their live stream. It is based on WMV with the OMA DRM but requires CCTV’s own plugin (which is about 1 meg in size). All on demand content is streamed to the Flash Player using Flash Media Server. FMS is also used for the chat rooms.
The 200 million link does indeed say that the US is leading by 28 million users. However, all these stats are based on stats from December last year which are the most recent numbers available. It is common believe that the Internet usage in China is indeed higher than in the US. On top of that, CCTV will publish 5000 VOD videos which is also the largest amount said to be published. So even though there are no recent stats, it still is the largest project based on the amount of videos posted.
Hope this satisfies your curiosity ;-)
Cool–that helps. Yeah, there’s just so much misinformation about this subject in particular.
Indeed a big win for the emergence of the online video as a mainstream player. Having worked with both NBC (Silverlight) and CCTV (Flash) and a host of other media companies in Europe for the Olympics stream monitoring, see the press release: http://keynote.com/company/press_room/releases_2008/08.27.08.html and a blog entry: http://blogs.keynote.com/the_watch/, it was nice to see the performance of the Web sites & the quality of the videos monitored to be of very high quality.
Rajeev Kutty
Keynote Systems