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GPUs to power streaming of Olympics

Many people watching the Olympics on smartphones or tablets will be receiving the Games thanks to Elemental Technologies and its innovative use of Nvidia GPUs. It is a pioneer in using GPUs to power video streaming over IP networks and will provide broadcasters from all over the world.

Many people watching the Olympics on smartphones or tablets will be receiving the Games thanks to Elemental Technologies and its innovative use of Nvidia GPUs. It is a pioneer in using GPUs to power video streaming over IP networks and will provide broadcasters from all over the world, including the BBC, Terra in Latin America, Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium and Eurosport, with the back-end infrastructure to live stream the games to set-top boxes, PCs, smartphones and tablets. During the 2008 Olympics, streaming started playing a prominent part in Games coverage, with NBCOlympics.com serving up 75.5 million streams, the BBC serving 40 million and China’s CCTV 100 million. With 725 million smartphones and 70 million tablets reported, by analysts Gartner, to be in use at end of 2011, and the prevalence of using mobile devices as second screens, those numbers are set to explode. For London 2012, “Elemental expects up to a billion viewers of its streaming content. In addition to more than 2,500 hours of live coverage, the company will encode and archive video for on-demand highlights and other assets for time-shifted viewing,” according to Nvidia’s Manager of Strategic Alliances, Michael Steele. “These numbers spell complexity. They involve a wide variety of use cases, video codecs, resolutions, screen sizes and other specifications. As the engines powering Elemental’s streaming service, Nvidia GPUs will help transform that complexity into a great viewing experience,” claimed Steele. He maintains that Elemental selected Nvidia thanks to its GPUs’ “unmatched combination of performance and energy efficiency. Using Nvidia GPUs, Elemental can encode three times as many streams per server rack while drawing one-third the watts per stream. Such gains have put Elemental in a position to offer a solution at half its competitor’s footprint, power consumption and cost. The result: broadcasters around the world will be able to serve up high-quality streaming across video formats cost-effectively.” www.elementaltechnologies.comwww.nvidia.com By David Fox