ARena

The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing had the world tuning in to watch their favorite sports, athletes and teams - but not just on TV. 2008 saw an explosion in the amount of content being watched via the internet, and Adobe Flash Player was leveraged by both the BBC and China's CCTV.com to deliver both live and on-demand Web video content.

A number of blogs have been posted that might be of interest to you,
including:
John O'Donovan from the BBC and Adobe's Ryan Stewart

Ryan makes some very interesting points, including:
* The majority of online video for the Olympics was delivered in Flash.
* For Beijing the BBC streamed nearly 40 million videos with up to 5.5 million Olympic videos watched each day at an average of around 3
million. In total there were 6.5 million hours of video delivered using Flash by the BBC.
* In the first 10 days CCTV's website streamed Olympic coverage to 100 million people...So in China we'll have 2,900 hours of Olympic content backed up and ready to watch with Flash Video.

You can find more information about the CCTV solution from the Adobe press release, but if you would like further information, please contact me.

Posted by Timothy Brook at 7:10 PM | Permalink

It's been a while since my last blog post - but I am going to try and get the blogging frequency turned up a little moving forward! As a kick-start I thought I'd give an update on press releases over the last few months.

First up, the Olympics (what else!). Adobe has teamed up with CCTV International Networks Co., Ltd (the company that owns the mainland China and Macau online video media rights to the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games) to deliver over 5000 hours of video content (3,800 hours of Olympic game video and 1,200 self-made video) from the games.  You can read the press release here, but essentially the 5000 hours of Flash video content will be delivered to millions of sports fans in mainland China and Macau through the "Olympic Network TV Station", CCTV.com’s next-generation online experience based on Adobe Flash and Flex technology.

Still on the subject of Flash video, back at the beginning of July, Adobe announced that we are working with Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the SWF format.  The press release is here, but essentially this announcement will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.

Just in case you haven't had enough video news, one more piece to wrap up.  In mid June (I know, I've been absent from blogging for some time!) Adobe provided an update on the uptake of the Adobe Media Player.  The press release is available here and the player is available here - unfortunately it is only available in the USA at the moment, but I know the team is working hard to change this!

On a more enterprisey note, in mid-June Adobe announced the a significant update to the LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES). Major additions to the suite include LiveCycle Content Services ES - based on the Alfresco Open Source CMS - and LiveCycle PDF Generator 3D ES. You can read the press release here.

Finally, MAX time is approaching fast. MAX USA is in San Francisco (Nov 16 - 19), and MAX EMEA is in Milan (Dec 1 - 4). Press release is here and MAX info is here.

Posted by Timothy Brook at 9:46 PM | Permalink