OTTCONversations: Sam Blackman, Elemental Technologies - The 2012 Summer Olympics Go OTT

As the world tunes in to the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London, more than 20,000 broadcasters aim to reach a potential global audience of 4 billion viewers with more than 4,000 hours of coverage. According to Sam Blackman, CEO and Co-founder of Portland Oregon-based Elemental Technologies, this year the Olympics are going over-the-top (OTT) and his company is serving up Olympic streams on a global scale with some of the biggest names in broadcast and media entertainment, including, the BBC in the UK, Terra in Latin America, Canada's Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium and Eurosport. The company is also supporting customers in the US and Japan. Elemental estimates that its multi-screen video processing deployments in 70 countries will help its broadcast customers reach upwards of a billion viewers worldwide.

I spoke with Blackman earlier this year at the Over-the-Top Conference, OOTTCON 2012, where he discussed, The Olympics Go OTT: Lessons Learned from the last 12 months in sports video streaming. Blackman says that total available TV audience for the Olympics has grown from 3.9B in 2004 to 4.7B in 2008, and that it's by far the biggest global sports even. Not only has the numbers of viewers grown, so has the number hours of professionally-produced live video content. Consumers want to watch the Olympics on all of their screens, and this year a record number of viewers all around the globe will watch live and video on-demand (VOD) content on TV, PCs, laptops, tablets, mobile phones and other connected devices.
“When we began the intense evaluation process for streaming of the Olympic Games more than a year ago, Elemental had little idea of just how broadly we’d be adopted on a global scale,” says Blackman.

In this video, Blackman summarizes five of the key lessons Elemental learned from working with the sports industry which it's put to use in delivering the 2012 Summer Olympics video stream.