During the Beijing Olympics, international broadcasters -- some of whom had never before broadcast live from the Chinese mainland -- went on site to bring the events to a worldwide audience of billions.
These companies relied both on their international network of fiber and satellite platforms as well as on support from offices and technical centers around the world.
With 204 countries taking part in the Olympics, representing potential viewership of 5 billion people, the goal was to bring the events to the living rooms of as many viewers as many countries as a broadcaster's capabilities can.
GlobeCast covered about two-thirds of this potential audience through major rightsholders and non-rightsholders from Asia, Europe and the Americas that receive satellite and fiber connectivity through its network.
The France Telecom subsidiary provided multiple unilateral feeds for rightsholding clients at the International Broadcasting Center (IBC) in Beijing such as ATV and I-Cable of Hong Kong, Solar Entertainment in the Philippines and TV Globo of Brazil.
For non-rightsholders, a location outside the IBC was made available, which allowed tape playout and international delivery via satellite and fiber to CNN, France 24, Orange, TVAsahi, TV Tokyo, Nippon TV, Rede Record (Brazil), KBS (Korea), Reuters, TV3 (Malaysia), ETV (South Africa) and others.
As the high definition format "really made its mark" in Beijing compared to Athens, there was greater use of fiber transmission solutions, and compression and modulation solutions for satellite transmissions like MPEG4 and DVB-S2.
The overall setup enabled broadcasters on site to focus on creating their content while matters related to technical management and delivery were left to a service provider.
GlobeCast Asia David Justin CEO said the company's presence in China, established partnerships with local Chinese service providers and its global network had helped it follow the torch relay and the 17 days of the Games.
"Because of these, we were able to provide high broadcast quality of the event to our customers from every continent," Justin said.