MUMBAI: The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has announced a number of initiatives aimed at providing access to additional Olympic content to the sports fans around Europe.
In addition to over 12,000 hours of TV coverage scheduled across the Eurovision territories, broadcasters are providing both live and deferred moving images of the games over both broadband Internet and mobile platforms.
European Internet users with broadband connections have widely available access to both live and on-demand video footage of the Olympic Games. In India, the event is airing on Doordarshan.
Pan-European broadband Internet users are able to watch at a time of their choosing, a selection of live and highlight packages freely available on a number of broadcaster websites. Broadcasters showing broadband content will include ARD and ZDF (Germany); DR (Denmark); DRS, TSR and TSI (Switzerland); ERT (Greece); SVT (Sweden), BBC (United Kingdom), NPB (Netherlands) NRK (Norway) and CanalPlus (France).
The EBU claims that broadband Internet users in over 30 European countries have experienced moving image services. To ensure that the IOC-acquired rights are adhered to, the EBU is using the latest geo-location and Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies to ensure that European Internet users have access to a full range of both on-demand and live new media services.
In addition to broadcaster WAP sites, a number of European mobile operators are offering moving image content packages in Slovenia, the UK, Slovakia, Poland, Switzerland, Spain and Italy. Moving image Olympic content is also available over the latest generation 3G networks, notably in Denmark, Sweden and Greece.