Aug, 2001 : Ebone Streams Pay-Per-View Concert to 10,000 Viewers

📅 August 1, 2001 - Viewers of a pay-per-view concert featuring Elton John wereable to watch the 1½-hour event in near TV-image and CD-sound quality as aresult of live video steaming capability provided by Ebone (ebone.com), oneof Europe's largest and most experienced optical and IP network servicesproviders. On the night of the concert and for the seven days afterwards,Ebone was able to support up to 10,000 viewers simultaneously at 100kpsacross its network.

The concert was held in a 1st century Roman amphitheatre in Ephesus, Turkey,on July 17. The concert webcast was managed and produced by Mediawave(mediawave.co.uk), a leading European webcasting company, and hosted on theMSN.co.uk website. Media Arts Corporation, which signed an exclusiveInternet partnership deal with Elton John, chose MediaWave to provide thesolution.
Ebone provided hosting facilities from its four largest hosting centres inLondon, Paris, Frankfurt and Amsterdam and live streaming media services.The concert was captured live and the data streams transmitted via satelliteuplink to London where they were encoded into 100kb/s and 300kb/s broadbandstreams at Mediawave's central data centre before being broadcast globallyacross the Ebone IP network.
As a result of the Elton John concert, Ebone and Mediawave plan to worktogether on other streaming media webcasts in the future.
"This is the coming of age of webcasting and Ebone helped us make it areality," said Mediawave's CEO Chris Frampton. "This kind of streamingmedia service redefines what is possible over the Net and will create newrevenue models for Internet broadcasts."
Ina Pontoppidan, recently appointed vice president, strategic salesdevelopment of Ebone Media, said: "Because we have Europe's largestbroadband and IP network with IP streaming capability that's unique in itsability to connect vast numbers of live users with video quality content, weare opening up new possibilities for media companies, broadcasters, serviceproviders and entertainment companies."
At the concert, Elton John played the first preview of his upcoming Songsfrom the West Coast, written with Bernie Taupin, along with some of hisclassics like "Your Song," "Candle in The Wind," "Crocodile Rock" and"Nikita." Additionally, special behind-the-scenes footage, competitions andother elements were included on the webcast. The cost was US$9.99 to accessthe 100k stream and US$14.99 to access the 300k stream.