Andrew Shorten @ Adobe

John O’Donnovan has an interesting post over on the BBC Internet blog talking about how the BBC’s Olympic content has been consumed over different media channels, including web, desktop and mobile.

Whilst I recommend that you read the entire post, especially for the insight John provides into how the BBC publishes content across different platforms, there are some statistical highlights I wanted to share here that really demonstrate how the BBC are putting Adobe’s technology to work.

Like most of the worldwide online Olympics coverage, notably bar NBC’s output in the US, the BBC used Flash Player to deliver both live and on-demand video content.

Whilst the BBC has just started publishing H.264 content on the iPlayer service, the Olympics coverage was output using the ON2 VP6 codec at 384kbps – even so, the quality and performance of the video, together with a choice of upto 7 streams, made for a really good online experience.

The sheer quantity of video content consumed through the BBC’s sport site is pretty amazing, and really shows how video on the web has taken a huge leap forward since the last Olympics in 2004 – here are some of the statistics (bare in mind that this is from just a UK audience):

• Nearly 40 million video streams served over the web
• Peak of 200,000 concurrent live and ondemand streams
• Over 6.5 million hours of Olympics video content consumed online
• Up to 5.5 million video clips watched each day

In addition, the BBC also launched a cross-OS desktop widget, running on Adobe AIR, that provided Olympics news and event alerts – this was installed by over 50,000 people and I think represents a solid start for the BBC’s use of this technology.

Further statistics on both video consumption and the AIR application downloads will be published on the BBC Internet blog once the Olympics are over.

Looking forward to the 2012 Olympics in London, one can only predict that the quantity and quality of online video content will continue to increase.

Flash on the Beach is coming up soon and we’ve got some tickets to give away – for your chance to win all you need to do is open up Photoshop or Fireworks and impress us with your creativity

Simply supply us with a photo that features you, has a beach theme and demonstrates your love for Flash, Flex or AIR to be in with a chance of winning! You can enter as many times as you like, but each person entering can only win a single ticket.

Serge Jespers is collecting the photos via his blog between now and September 8th – then, each of the European platform evangelists will pick their favourite entry and that person will win a full pass to Flash on the Beach (worth £499)!

Winners will be picked based on the creativity of the photo –  see Serge’s beach picture and you’ll get the idea… good luck!

This autumn Marco Casario, Peter Elst and Koen De Weggheleire will be running ‘Meet the Guru’ training sessions in London – as I’m sure you already know, all of these guys are accomplished authors, conference speakers and developers and are well-deserving of their ‘guru’ status. If you’re looking for developer-to-developer training in ActionScript 3, Flex 3 or AIR then you should check out these courses.

More information on each of the 3 day ‘Meet the Guru’ training sessions is here: http://www.comtaste.com/en/training.htm

It’s less than two weeks to go to Flex Camp London (August 28th, 2pm – 8pm, London, UK) – the official event website is now up at http://www.flexcamp.co.uk and registration is well and truly open… in fact, there’s nearly 200 people registered for Flex Camp already!

The event organisers are still working on the final schedule for the day, so keep an eye on the Flex Camp website for the latest information and for additional speakers.

To support the ScaleNine.com contest I created a series of short tutorials that cover using Fireworks CS3 and Flex Builder 3 to create a visual theme for Flex applications.

If you’re new to skinning Flex components and creating Flex themes I hope these are useful:

• Setting up Flex Builder
• Setting up Fireworks CS3
• Editing skin templates
• Export skins from Fireworks
• Importing skins into Flex Builder
• Testing and customizing skins

You might also like to read Narciso Jaramillo’s article on ‘Creating skins for Flex using Creative Suite 3 and Flex Builder 3‘ and the Flex documentation on skinning.

Skinning, along with creating visual components in Flash CS3, represent the main ways for designers to work with developers on Flex applications today.

As we look to the future we can see that Flex 4 (Gumbo) and Thermo will provide new workflows for creating rich internet applications – see Ted’s Thermo screenshots blog post to see how Thermo is coming along and be sure to attend MAX later this year if you want to learn more about Thermo.