Customizable, Feature-Rich Player Enables Online Viewing of Live and On-Demand Sports
LAS VEGAS -- April 8, 2013 -- Today at the 2013 NAB Show, Vimond Media Solutions announced the Vimond Sports Experience, a new product that enables users to create extraordinary online environments for sports fans. Vimond Sports Experience is a sports-specific online-viewing service for its Vimond Platform, which drives multiformat over-the-top (OTT) services for all major Nordic broadcasters and others around the world.
The Vimond Sports Experience is a suite of modular and flexible player and application frameworks that forms a complete ecosystem for monetizing sports online, enabling broadcasters to take full advantage of their sports broadcasting rights. With the Vimond Sports Experience, broadcasters are able to give fans a way to watch live and on-demand sporting events across multiple devices through an extensive and feature-rich universal player, creating an interactive viewing experience they cannot get from traditional television. Value-added features -- such as statistics, polls, maps, chat, and sharing -- help keep viewers involved and collaborating across the screens, thereby growing a community of loyal spectators.
"Sports offer an important, effective way to drive traffic to -- and generate revenue from -- any OTT service, and in order to get the most out of it, the experience must be different from regular TV," said Helge Høibraaten, CEO of Vimond Media Solutions. "Our open, highly modular, and easy-to-integrate complete ecosystem for online sports delivery enables broadcasters to serve viewers effectively with a rich, sophisticated viewing experience designed for their favorite sports."
The live sports ecosystem enables broadcasters to offer their online TV subscribers totally interactive video players that have been created for specific sports, such as ice hockey or soccer. In addition to allowing subscribers to watch live or on-demand matches online with full DVR and time-shifting capabilities, the Vimond Sports Experience is equipped with a wide range of other features. Viewers can switch cameras to see additional angles or live streams; chat with other viewers; publish comments to Facebook; review team statistics, match line-ups, and other facts; and much more -- all within Vimond's player framework, with tabs and overlaying information fields.
The Vimond Sports Experience is the end-user-facing counterpart to the modular, flexible framework Vimond developed specifically for sports rights holders. It is part of a broad suite of application frameworks in the Vimond front-end layer known as the Vimond Experience. The back-end Sports Experience framework acts as a layer between Vimond's APIs and the portal, tying everything together and enabling programmers to create rich experiences for sports fans in weeks instead of months. Because the Vimond Sports Experience framework contains a library of sports-oriented features that are already implemented on Vimond APIs, broadcasters can quickly and easily style a sports site with the exact look and features they want, rather than having to build the site from scratch and then figure out how to implement its features. The Vimond Sports Experience framework supports all player formats, including Flash(R), HTML5, and Silverlight(R).
The Vimond Sports Experience technology has been proven at some of the Nordics' leading online TV services that use it to deliver soccer, ice hockey, and Tour de France experiences to fans live and on demand. These installations have validated the technology's revenue-generating power, as well as the ability to communicate across screens and integrate the online experience with linear TV.
Vimond will demonstrate these installations at the 2013 NAB Show in booth SL10310. Further information on Vimond Media Solutions and its products is available at www.vimond.com or by phone at +47 97602236.
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About Vimond Media Solutions
Vimond Media Solutions AS (www.vimond.com) develops and markets the Vimond online TV platform. Based in Bergen, Norway, Vimond is one of a number of successful technology companies spun off from national broadcaster TV 2, together with Vizrt, StormGeo, and Mosart Medialab. After more than 10 years of technology development and use in production at Scandinavia's biggest commercial online video enterprise, TV 2 Sumo, Vimond was established in 2011 to make advanced solutions available to other broadcasters launching multiscreen over-the-top services. The Vimond platform provides a comprehensive environment for managing highly efficient streaming of content to cellphones, tablet computers, gaming consoles, connected TVs, and Blu-ray" players. With its depth of experience and expertise, Vimond is a leading player in the field, serving a rapidly growing roster of customers that includes TV4 in Sweden, MTV3 in Finland, TV 2 in Norway, and pan-Nordic distributor C More.
