NRK: Norwegian Broadcasting Company
NRK Captures Gold for High-Quality Winter Olympics Coverage, More Than 1 in 4 Norwegians Tune in Online
NRK Captures Gold for High-Quality Winter Olympics Coverage, More Than 1 in 4 Norwegians Tune in Online
The Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK), Norway's largest media organization, wanted to provide greatly enhanced online coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics, including live events. The company engaged with Microsoft and leading technology partners to take advantage of Microsoft Silverlight and Internet Information Services (IIS) Smooth Streaming to provide Web-based coverage of the Olympics, both live and on-demand. NRK met the challenge of Winter Olympics coverage with astonishing success, providing more than 1 million hours of streamed video in crystal clear, 720p HD. The combination of IIS Smooth Streaming and Silverlight provided a compelling, powerful experience for Norway's sports fans.
Six NRK encoders in Oslo, Norway, received feeds from the Olympic Broadcasting System (OBS) via Toronto for NRK's two broadcast channels, NRK1 and NRK2, for the events. These channels delivered localized content with Norwegian commentary, and the focus was primarily on Norwegian athletes. From Oslo, content was streamed over Akamai Europe's HD Network, which features a highly distributed, HTTP-based content delivery network.
Meanwhile, iStreamPlanet handled the video workflow for OBS feeds only, including 19 HD video feeds. iStreamPlanet decoded the multicast feeds to HD-SDI, routed the feeds to assigned encoders, and provisioned the IIS Smooth Streaming publishing points.
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