AT&T Delivers Three-Screen Masters Coverage

Written by Ryan Lawler

Wednesday, April 8. 2009 at 04:50 PM EDT 1 comment

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As the 2009 Master Tournament kicks off today, AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) will leverage its content delivery network (CDN), U-Verse IPTV plant, and mobile network to deliver interactive coverage of the event to all three of its customers' screens.

As a sponsor of the event, AT&T is one of three companies with rights to distribute live and on-demand coverage from the 2009 Masters. CBS Sports and ESPN hold the cable and broadcast rights for the event.

AT&T will provide live and on-demand video of the tournament, starting with live coverage of today's Par 3 Contest. The carrier will also provide one hour of live play-by-play action before cable and network broadcast coverage begins, as well as live coverage of the 11th, 12th, 13th, 15th, and 16th holes.

On-demand video, which is available to AT&T Fan Zone viewers as well as U-Verse subscribers, includes "Masters Moments," a series of 24 vignettes highlighting action from past tournaments, player interviews, and daily "Masters Today" tournament previews and "Masters Tonight" recaps.

The carrier will be leverage its newly relaunched CDN -- AT&T Intelligent Content Distribution Service (ICDS) -- to power the online portion of its coverage on the AT&T Fan Zone Website.

While CBS picked Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE) Flash technology for its online Masters coverage, AT&T chose the Move Networks Inc. player to provide its online video of the event. AT&T picked Move's adaptive streaming technology to ensure that the stream was the highest bit-rate possible, according to John Watson, executive director of market development.

"The main reason for using Move was to make sure we could produce a very high-quality experience. By combining the adaptive streaming technology of Move Networks with our ICDS CDN, we can provide the highest possible quality on a laptop or desktop, giving users a television-like experience," Watson says.

The Fan Zone page has three live screens, with one main window that can go full screen and will have a top bit rate of 2.4 Mbit/s and two minor screens that will each run at approximately 100 Kbit/s each. If a user finds something interesting on one of the smaller screens, he or she can switch to it.

"We're getting out of the linear programming world that programmer gives to you, and putting the user much more in control of what they're watching when they're watching it. It's like picture-in-picture on steroids," Watson says.

Managed Webcasting firm iStreamPlanet did much of the integration work and built the video player for AT&T. The firm will also provide encoding and manage the user experience during the tournament.

While the online component is a big part of AT&T's Masters coverage, the carrier has also created an interactive channel for its U-verse IPTV subscribers and mobile applications for AT&T wireless subscribers.

AT&T wireless customers will have access to live and on-demand Masters programming from their mobile phones with AT&T Mobile TV, MobiTV, and Cellular Video (CV) services. The company has also developed a Masters app for iPhone owners that features an updated Leaderboard, player scorecards, stats, news updates, tournament photos, and video archives.