LOS ANGELES – Aug. 16, 2006 – The 2006 World Handball Championships made a huge technology leap in recent days by being broadcast live over the Internet for the first time ever via a revolutionary new online distributed broadcast technology developed by Network Foundation Technologies (NFT). Fans from across the globe – from Australia and New Zealand, to Japan, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Israel – tuned in their computers to watch the games live. “We are delighted to have partnered with StreamGuys and Network Foundation Technologies to bring this event to the fans,” said Jeff Kastner of World Pro Handball, who organized the broadcast of the event. “The NFT technology is amazing. The service provided by both StreamGuys and NFT was exceptional, and fans were elated with the results.”
Jonathan Speaker, COO of StreamGuys, Inc., said, “Over the years there have been a lot of companies that have made a lot of promises in the live P2P or distributed broadcasting space. Network Foundation Technologies stands out from the crowd by delivering on those promises. We are pleased to partner with NFT to offer their technology to our customers.”
Kiriki Delany, President and CTO of StreamGuys added, "The World Handball Championships provided another validation of NFT's unparalleled ability to deliver live online distributed broadcasts under real-world conditions in a manner that exceeded our client's expectations." NFT President and Co-Founder Marcus Morton stressed that his company’s technology can deliver high-quality video streams, of both live and pre-recorded content, to large online audiences at low cost. “In fact, our technology reduced the peak bandwidth needed to deliver the Men’s Finals of the World Handball Championships by more than 60 percent with no degradation in broadcast stream quality. And the audience was clearly engaged, as the average length of each viewing session was 1 hour and 36 minutes.”
Dr. Mike O’Neal, NFT’s Founder and Chief Scientist, emphasized that NFT technology achieves its twin goals of high quality and low cost while maintaining good net citizenship. “NFT spreads the costs of delivering the broadcast evenly throughout the network. In some live P2P systems, high-bandwidth corporate and university nodes are used to subsidize the viewing experience of end-users who tune in from lower bandwidth home connections. In contrast, NFT is designed to exist comfortably within the limits of the upstream bandwidth rates commonly available to home users in the United States,” O’Neal said.