Olympic Games Covered by Chinese P2P Video Provider (via CCTV)

2008 Summer Olympics which will be held in Beijing are an international multi-sport event with millions of fans worldwide. Of course, those fans turn at some point into viewers and this is where companies battle over broadcast rights. We already know about NBC’s intention to offer online video from the event. Recently, a Chinese company that provides streaming TV feeds through P2P technology has also received green light in the same respect after reaching an agreement with China Central Television (CCTV). The company is PPLive.

CCTV.com will reportedly provide the video as it is the official internet broadcaster of the Olympics in China. As revealed by AC Nielsen ratings, PPLive streams video to 35 million viewers across the world monthly.

Bill Yao, Founder and CEO of PPLive Inc expressed his enthusiasm about the collaboration: "We are very excited to partner with CCTV.com to broadcast the Beijing Olympic Games through our new Internet media platform. We are committed to delivering to our viewers the highest quality and most in-depth coverage of the sporting games that make up the Olympics."

In his turn, Mr. Shan Xiaolei, Director, Technology Management Commission, CCTV, talked about how they manage to cope with bandwidth costs: "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" (…) "On2 have helped us quickly address this problem by contributing the Flix Engines we need to publish our sports coverage in TrueMotion-based Flash video."

So, this means the On2 Flix Engine will be employed to encode the video to On2 Technology's TrueMotion VP6 video codec, which will be sent afterwards through Adobe Flash to both the CCTV and PPLive websites.