The entire world is anticipating the start of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, and when they settle in and glue themselves to their televisions for two weeks, they’ll have Omneon to thank in part, as the company has been selected to provide storage, processing, a high-speed content distribution platform to support the live HD production workflow and to streamline delivery of all Internet and VOD content during the Olympics from February 12-28, 2010.

NBC will use an Omneon MediaGrid active storage system with the high-performance EVS XT[2] production server to give viewers fast and seamless access to live and near-live HD media. The Omneon platform will enable the creation, processing, and delivery of clips with greater speed and reliability than ever before.

NBC.com plans to offer over 400 hours of live coverage of events as well as more than 1,000 hours of on-demand access to replays from broadcast as well and host-feed coverage of the events. Highlights, recaps, best-of montages, analyses, and athlete-specific clips will also be available. Viewers will have access to HD-quality coverage and DVR-style controls that will make it easy to pause and rewind during live coverage. The 2006 Olympics only streamed two hours of live action to MBC.com, which served as a back-end test.

Omneon has an extensive global presence with customers in more than 50 countries, offering customers in professional media organizations an open platform optimized for the production, transformation and distribution of digital media. Omneon is based in Sunnyvale, California.