Today, Adobe and NBC Olympics announced the official NBC Olympics apps for the iPad, iPhone and select Android tablets and smartphones. For the first time in Olympics history, mobile apps will give you the opportunity to view live broadcasts of all Olympic events in the palm of your hand. This is possible because of the partnership between Adobe and NBC Olympics, and Adobe’s ability to provide leading video technology solutions at scale. We believe the Olympics will be a defining moment for digital video and we are proud to play a role.

The “NBC Olympics Live Extra” and “NBC Olympics” apps will provide a huge variety of content – from live streams of all competitive events to short video highlights, medal ceremonies, interviews, news stories and more. We’re thrilled that both apps are powered by a series of products and technologies from Adobe, which made it possible for NBC Olympics to more easily bring them to a wide range of mobile and tablet platforms and devices.

Adobe creative tools, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Flash Builder, Flex and others, were used to design and build the apps. With Adobe AIR, our runtime for Flash content outside web browsers, NBC Olympics is able to leverage existing code to ensure a consistent content and video playback experience across devices without having to develop the apps natively for each platform. By integrating support for Adobe Pass, NBC Olympics is using the industry’s leading “TV Everywhere” authentication technology used by virtually all operators in the U.S. You simply provide the login and password of your pay-TV subscription to access live broadcast streams of over 3500 hours of Olympic events. To make it as easy as possible, you only need to go through the sign-in once and won’t have to “re-authenticate” every time you want to watch a live event.

NBC Olympics is also taking advantage of Adobe technologies to measure and monetize content in both apps. Advertising onto mobile devices will be served via Adobe Auditude, our video ad management and monetization platform. Auditude will work in conjunction with other existing NBC ad serving systems and is used by major brands worldwide like Comcast, Major League Baseball, Fox News, E! Entertainment, Dailymotion and others. SiteCatalyst, our flagship product for digital analytics, allows NBC Olympics to measure user traffic and engagement across both apps for live video streams, ads and video-on-demand (VOD) content for iOS and Android devices. This enables NBC Olympics to quickly optimize the app experience based on viewer behavior.

A few other great things I wanted to highlight: Each app is interconnected, so you can easily launch one of the apps from within the other to streamline usability. Both apps offer social media integration that lets you share and communicate with friends via Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus as the Games happen in London. You can also set reminders for your favorite sport events, and, pause or rewind.

Check out this video for more information about the apps and how Adobe and NBC Olympics is taking the 2012 Olympics beyond the TV and offering a whole new experience across mobile devices: