China’s nationwide broadcasting network, CCTV, will use the On2 Flix Engine to encode and publish video coverage of the Beijing Olympics on its domestic Web site at www.cctv.com, according to On2 Technologies, Inc. CCTV, the official Internet and mobile phone broadcaster of the 2008 games, will deliver an exclusive video on demand service using On2 VP6-based Adobe Flash video across its network of more than 1000 servers, bringing 24/7 accessibility to the 2008 Beijing Olympics to China’s Internet users.
Flix Engine is a server side platform for encoding and publishing Flash video. On2 said that VP6 couples high quality with low data rates and supports cue points and alpha channel in Adobe Flash. It is proprietary to On2 Technologies, so it does not require content royalties like those levied by MPEG-LA, the company said.
“Our bandwidth costs are very high as we need to support a large number of concurrent downloads, and this will inevitably increase during the Olympics,” said Shan Xiaolei, director, Technology Management Commission, CCTV. “On2 has helped us quickly address this problem by contributing the Flix Engines we need to publish our sports coverage in TrueMotion-based Flash video.”