#elemental technologies

NBC, which bought sole broadcast rights for the U.S. market for a whopping $1.18 billion, will provide 5,535 hours of Olympics coverage across its various TV and online properties, including high-definition and 3-D video. For the first time, the network will stream live feeds for all events. Viewers will be able to watch less popular competitions like badminton and field hockey along with the marquee events like swimming or track and field.

Viewers watching that digital stream might be using one of hundreds of different digital platforms, from smartphones with a range of screen sizes to tablets, laptops and web-enabled Smart TV. Given this reality, the question is how can a single video stream fit onto a smartphone but also elegantly display on a high-definition TV?

The answer is that it can’t. That’s where Portland’s Elemental Technologies comes in.

“Our core technology is about converting video to formats for multiscreen display,” says Elemental’s Keith Wymbs, vice president of marketing. “We’re delivering the Olympics in more than 70 countries through a number of broadcasters, who have developed their own players and apps for their customers to view it in.”

TV broadcasters that bought rights to show the 2012 Olympics also own the rights to deliver digital content to other platforms within their exclusive service area, Wymbs says.

Besides NBC, the company is also working with CTV in Canada, a Japanese broadcast consortium, Terra, Latin America’s largest Internet portal, the UK’s BBC and Eurosport, an all-sport television channel broadcast across Europe. It will also provide Olympic coverage to a number of countries under the International Olympic Committee’s requirements for transnational feeds. In total, around 1 billion viewers will watch content supported by Elemental.

Out of one, many

Broadcasters feed a raw digital video signal into one of Elemental’s servers. The servers then process the live stream into outputs that are optimized for a number of devices or convert the feed into files for video-on-demand playback, depending on the functionality the broadcasters want to provide viewers.

Developers at six-year-old Elemental have figured out how to process and compress the live stream on the fly as well as making video on demand available much more quickly than was previously possible. To do it, CEO and cofounder Sam Blackman says they’ve used the chips developed for 3-D game rendering to process video.

“Dozens of versions of content are needed to cover the gamut of devices that are out there,” Wymbs says. “We’ve been adopted by broadcasters worldwide because we can do a lot in a small footprint. We can get the stream in and come out with dozens of outputs from one box.”

For video-on-demand playback, which is a core element to NBC’s online Olympic coverage at NBCOlympics.com, Wymbs says his company has developed a much more efficient process that has cut the amount of time it takes to generate multiple iterations of digital content from about six hours to 30 minutes. “By halftime, we can create highlights for those who missed the game,” he says.