Euro 2008 Live in France Streamed With Flash
By: Stefan Richter
This is a follow-up to my post “Live Uefa Euro 2008 via FMS”. I’ve just heard that the Euro 2008 is streamed live with Flash in France too.
This time DBee is doing the encoding for the website of the french TV Channel M6. They are serving a 1.1Mbps stream (1Mbps VP6 video + 64 Kbps MP3 audio) sized at 534×300 (16/9), using a Digital Rapids StreamZ Live and FME as a backup, from a DVB-T source via SDI input. The stream is served by the FMS3 Limelight platform which sustains a ‘very heavy load’ in terms of concurrent streams, however exact details on viewership could not be shared.
The user experience both on the page itself as well as in full screen is nice, a fact confirmed by the choice of the public: up to 65% of the users choose Flash, compared to Windows Media which is also being offered. This is an interesting figure, because on a comparable event one year ago during the Evian Masters, DBee reported that only 40% of users picked Flash while over 60% chose Windows Media.
The next match is the semi-final between Russia and Spain on the 26th of June, but note that streams are geo-locked to French web users.
