IST OLYMPIC project has successfuly performed pilot trials during the Athens 2004 Olympic and Paralympic games
The IOC (International Olympic Committee) was aware of the potential of the emerging streaming technologies and of public the demand and gave the authorization for streaming the Games over the internet. One of the solutions that provided live coverage of the Athens 2004 Summer Olympic Games was the IST project OLYMPIC (Olympics Multimedia Personalized for the Internet Community). The OLYMPIC project consists of European companies and organizations such as Atos Origin (Spain), National Technical University of Athens (Greece), INOV (Portugal), Telecom Italia SpA (Italy), Hellenic Telecommunications Organization OTE S.A. (Greece), Thales Broadcast and Multimedia (France), E.R.T. S.A. (Greece), OTEnet S.A. (Greece) and Siemens Mobile Communications SpA (Italy) and is sponsored by the Information Society of Technology (IST). The scope of the OLYMPIC project is to offer live and prerecorded content of various events to end-users with quality depending on their bandwidth capabilities, from high speed Ethernet to handheld devices. In order to accomplish the aforementioned goal, a self-organized Overlay Network featuring stream transcoding in real time, as well as with QoS monitoring and reporting was deployed in order to provide streaming video in MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 format. The existence of end-users with a large variety of bandwidth capacity and the transmission of live video streams with strict QoS requirements over an unreliable and unpredictable network such as the internet, make the aforementioned goal a complex and difficult venture to accomplish. We should note that the OLYMPIC project aims to exploit the vast amount of video content that is not used in television transmission, giving the internet users the choice of selecting specific cameras for viewing a specific event or to watch a less prestigious event that is not broadcasted on TV. This implies that the scope of the OLYMPIC project is not to act as competitive to traditional television but supplementary to it. The platform developed was successfully tested during the Athens 2004 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games. During the Olympic Games, the OLYMPIC project platform, using content from ERT S.A. which was the holder of the Olympic Games coverage rights in Greece, gave the opportunity to specific internet users from Greece (OTENET subscribers and from NTUA) to watch live, various sport events providing in parallel extra information for the specific events. Interconnection (leased lines, optical rings, WDM network etc) for supporting media distribution from the Olympic venue site up to the end client was supported by OTE being both a partner of the project and a golden sponsor of the games. The only requirements for the internet users were to download and install the projects video player, which therefore was embedded in their browser (Internet Explorer) and enable internet cookie reception. Here we must note that access to the content was offered only to broadband users in Greece due to restrictions on the rights for broadcasting the games posed by IOCs policy. Those rights were available to the project through the participation of ERT S.A. As a target group for the trials, OTENET (the largest ISP in Greece) internet users owning DSL connections were selected as potential pilot users, and platform availability during the trials days was advertised to them. Internet users owning broadband connections could simultaneously view live sport events, enhancing their viewing experience. In addition during the Paralympics, the internet users supplementary to the aforementioned services, were able to watch prerecorded videos featuring the opening and closing ceremonies of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games, video highlights from the previous day events and from the Sydneys 2000 Games. Access to all the previous streams was free of charge during the days of the pilot trials. After completing the pilot trials, the OLYMPIC project plans to continue offering the project platform to more users, for a three weeks period in which all three channels of ERT will be available over the Internet on a 9-5 basis during weekdays, over the projects platform. Finally, gaining experience from the aforementioned public trials the partners of the OLYMPIC project aim to further develop and expertise their platform. It should be noted that during the 2nd EU-China Working Group on Digital Olympics held on April 28, 2004 in Beijing, China (http://www.eurochina2002.com/digital_olympics.html(öffnet in neuem Fenster)) the OLYMPIC project presented a cooperation initiative which was included in the list of recommended cooperation initiatives by the Chinese side.More information on the project, its results and plans can be found on http://olympic.sema.es(öffnet in neuem Fenster)
Länder
Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal