Elemental helps power Olympics coverage

Elemental Technologies Inc. on Monday said its technology will power live streams of the London Olympic games for broadcasters worldwide, including the British Broadcasting Corp.

Portland-based Elemental, whose technology processes and encodes video so it can be streamed to various types of devices, said the BBC will stream 2,500 hours of the Olympic Games using its Elemental Live technology, which will help them encode and archive video for on-demand content. It will also give its audience a choice of up to 24 alternative live high-definition streams.

Eurosport plans to deliver the Games to personal computers in 50 countries, to smartphones and tablets in 33 countries, and to users of the Panasonic Smart TV in 38 countries. To do so, it is using an Elemental “encoding farm,” consisting of 13 Elemental Live systems handling 42 Eurosport live video streams.

In Latin America, the Terra network will stream more than 2,000 hours of the Olympics using Elemental gear, reaching more than 17 countries.

Werner Michels, Terra’s engineering director, said in a news release that Elemental’s technology has allowed it to process 50 percent more content using half of the server rack space than the vendor the company used during the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010.

“When we began the intense evaluation process for streaming of the Olympic Games more than a year ago, Elemental had little idea of just how broadly we’d be adopted on a global scale,” Elemental CEO Sam Blackman said in a news release. “To play such an integral role in the ‘first truly digital Olympics’ is a privilege that every Elemental employee accepts with great pride.”

Elemental in May closed a $13 million Series C round of financing that Blackman said would help the company — which grew its sales to $10 million last year — expand to global markets.

Around the same time, the company moved into a new 17,000-square-foot downtown headquarters at 225 S.W. Broadway Blvd.