BBC offers Olympic Games via broadband

The BBC will this week begin its first widespread use of live broadband internet broadcasting, for coverage of the Olympic Games.

Home internet users will have access to more than 1,200 hours of live coverage from the Games, with five broadband streams broadcasting exclusive events as well as normal TV programming.

Richard Cooper, head of technology at the BBC's New Media division, told Computing the corporation plans to increase high-speed streaming of sporting events and switch all future web broadcasts to multicasting technology.

Specialist software known as Geo-IP, from supplier Quova, will be used to ensure programmes can only be viewed in the UK.

'We will provide more than 1,200 hours of Olympic coverage on the web, including live programming that you can see on TV, and four streams of other events direct from Athens, said Cooper.

'The Olympic rights exist for us to do this only in the UK and we need to restrict its broadcast and abide to them.'

Network capacity has been increased from 3.5 to 12Gb/s and new datacentre facilities added to manage up to 40,000 simultaneous broadband streams.

'We have been streaming content since 1995, but it has been predominantly narrowband,' said Cooper.

Multicasting is also being piloted for the first time with 12 ISPs, and if successful will be rolled out for all future internet screenings, says Cooper.

'We would like to be in a position, in a short time, where we are only making content available using multicasting,' he said.

Multicasting will help the BBC reduce costs by sending out content to distributed servers and ISPs once, allowing many recipients to access content from the same source.

The trial will use Real 10 player, as well as H.264 video and AAC audio standards.

Using geographic analysis of cache and computer proxies, as well as ISP records, the BBC will also use Geo-IP for future streaming projects where it wants to differentiate programming by territory, says Cooper.