Satellite Players Direct Olympic Traffic

Intelsat, GlobeCast manage myriad feeds at 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games.

By Glen Dickson -- Broadcasting & Cable, 8/8/2008 4:00:00 PM

While telco AT&T is providing transmission capacity for NBC’s 2008 Beijing Olympic Games coverage via fiber optic links, satellite players are still handling a variety of both sports and news feeds from Beijing for international broadcasters.

Satellite giant Intelsat, which has transmitted coverage of every Olympic Games since 1968, is providing multiple transponders to the European Broadcasting Union for its HD coverage from Beijing. The EBU will use C-/Ku-band cross-strap capacity on the Intelsat 706 satellite, located at 50.2 degrees east, to distribute the HD Olympic coverage to its members.

“By using Intelsat to deliver the Summer Games, we are confident that our members will benefit from the reliable service Intelsat offers when it comes to large-scale events,” said Stefan Kürten, director of the Eurovision operations department, in a statement.

Intelsat will also be on-site in Beijing providing managed services to both Olympics rights-holders and non-rights-holding broadcasters, including managed platforms for encoding and multiplexing; managed fiber services; turnaround services on the Intelsat network including standards conversion, remux and data/Internet protocol; a live-shot position, with backdrop of the Olympic Stadium and Olympic Green; multiformat tape-play-out services; and a feed point connected to a fixed uplink in Beijing.

Meanwhile, France Telecom subsidiary GlobeCast is providing an array of services to rights-holders and non-rights-holders for worldwide distribution.

For rights-holding broadcasters, GlobeCast is providing dedicated HD and standard-definition uplink paths from the IBC (International Broadcast Centre) satellite-dish farm, for end-to-end delivery of the ABU (Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union) sport pool’s World Feed.

GlobeCast is also providing multiple unilateral feeds (including 2 in HD) for clients including ATV (Hong Kong), I-Cable (Hong Kong), Solar Entertainment (Philippines) and TV Globo (Brazil).

For its outbound feeds from the IBC, GlobeCast is employing advanced transmission standards including HD in MPEG-4 and DVB S2 modulation.

Outside of the IBC, GlobeCast partnered with 7BMC to offer services to non-rights-holding broadcasters including playout and international delivery via satellite and fiber in partnership with local authorized Chinese service providers. Clients for those services include CNN, ESPN, France 24, Orange, TVAsahi, TV Tokyo, Nippon TV, Rede Record (Brazil), KBS (Korea), Reuters, TV3 (Malaysia) and ETV (South Africa).

GlobeCast also secured live stand-up positions at Pangu Plaza and Crouching Dragon Market, providing views of the national stadium (Bird’s Nest) and the aquatic center (Water Cube) in the background.