Digital Rapids has been selected to provide media encoding, transcoding and streaming systems to NBC for the network's Internet coverage of the 2008 Olympic Games from Beijing, China, August 8-24.

Digital Rapids' DRC-Stream encoding and streaming solutions will enable NBC Olympics' unprecedented live and on-demand online coverage of the Beijing Olympics. 2200 hours of video will be streamed live on the Internet at NBCOlympics.com, primarily encoded from video feeds into web-friendly streams through the DRC-Stream systems. Streams will be encoded in the VC-1 compression format for a viewing experience powered by Microsoft Silverlight technology. The encoded live streams will also be archived for viewers to watch on-demand. Digital Rapids Transcode Manager, the enterprise-class solution for scalable, high-volume media file transcoding, will be used to convert affiliate-provided content between compression and file formats for U.S. domestic distribution.

"We're thrilled to continue our relationship with NBC by supplying our solutions for coverage of this year's paramount event, the Beijing Olympics," says Brick Eksten, President of Digital Rapids Corporation. "The nearly unlimited scope of Internet-based video lends itself perfectly to coverage of an event of this scale, and our solutions are renowned for bringing video to the web with exceptional quality and reliability. We're pleased that NBC has again placed their trust in our technology and expertise for their ground-breaking online coverage.

"Delivering an unparalleled online experience is a vital component of our unprecedented multi-platform coverage of the Beijing Olympics.  The Digital Rapids encoding systems will enable an outstanding viewing experience for our online audience through superior encoded video quality and robust reliability, while providing us the workflow efficiencies needed for coverage of this magnitude,” says Rab Mukraj, Director of Digital Media Delivery at NBC Universal.