Level 3 Delivers Flash Streaming for Mountain Sports International

Company Uses Adobe Live Flash Technology to Stream Freeskiing Event to Fans around the World

Level 3 Communications’ Content Markets Group today announced that it delivered live coverage of Mountain Sports International’s U.S. Freeskiing Nationals event over the Internet. Streaming the event live with Adobe Flash, Level 3 enabled Mountain Sports International (MSI) to provide a high-quality live video experience to winter sports fans around the globe.

MSI develops and produces action and adventure sports events and programming. MSI owns and produces the U.S. Freeskiing Series, the U.S. Skiercross Series, and the Freeskiing World Tour. Using Level 3’s Streaming services and the Adobe Flash Player, MSI enabled viewers around the world to instantly and easily access the live action of the U.S. Freeskiing competition, broadcast online from Snowbird, Utah, March 21 and 22. The event was an interactive media delivery experience, enabling action sports fans to access live competition instantly, view immediately uploaded highlight clips, and even get involved in the commentary through interactive chat boards as the events unfolded.

“Level 3 provided flawless delivery of MSI’s U.S. Freeskiing Nationals event,” said Adam Comey, president and co-founder of Mountain Sports International. “Their reliable, high quality streaming services enabled us to scale quickly to meet the demands of our global audience, and their proven support gave us the confidence to focus on the creative endeavors of our business.”.

“Until recently, fans of action winter sports who were unable to travel to remote mountain locations had to settle for static pictures or after-the-fact videos,” said Grant van Rooyen, president of Level 3’s Content Markets Group. “As the demand for live online action sports accelerates, MSI is helping to define the action sports culture. Level 3 is proud to enable MSI’s efforts to expand live action sports from a niche crowd to a broad viewing audience all around the world.”

Level 3 is an Adobe Premier Authorized Flash Video Streaming Service Partner. Level 3’s service expands the options available for delivering Flash-enabled video for content publishers to deliver their video content. The integration of Flash technology into Level 3’s CDN services makes it possible for customers to leverage Level 3’s large IP network to effectively deliver Flash-enabled video around the world.

“Level 3’s high-performance, reliable network and CDN services are an ideal platform to deliver on-demand video with Adobe Flash Player,” said Bill Rusitzky, director for global media alliances at Adobe. “The combination of Level 3’s Streaming services and Adobe Flash technology provides customers access to a very effective way to deliver rich video applications to the largest possible audiences without the hassle of setting up and maintaining their own streaming server hardware and network.”

Level 3 has long been the leading distributor of sports backhaul content to the majority of professional sports venues in the U.S. with its Vyvx services portfolio. With its CDN and Streaming services, Level 3 has all aspects of the content delivery value chain for traditional and non-traditional distribution.

“Level 3 is driving innovation and bringing robust solutions to the creation-to-consumption value chain,” said van Rooyen. “Using technologies like Adobe Flash, we are able to better serve the diverse needs of our customers like MSI, who need to scale to reach their expanding online audiences quickly and reliably. Level 3’s network serves as a foundation to connect people and information via the Internet, and our content delivery services were specifically designed for the tremendous amount of bandwidth required to deliver high-performance streaming of live sporting events.”