Accessible tech bringing Paralympics to a device near you

MEDIA RELEASE
For immediate release
Auckland, 10 March 2013

Accessible technology bringing Sochi Paralympic Games to a device near you

The Sochi 2014 Paralympic Winter Games are being broadcast via a new web platform that employs the latest technology to work across multiple devices, various internet speeds and with accessibility at its core.

Attitude Pictures secured the local rights to broadcast the Paralympic Winter Games and has had only six weeks to get its AttitudeLive web portal ready to receive live streams direct from Sochi.

Forty four hours of free coverage and highlights of the Paralympic games will air on the AttitudeLive web platform, which Ricoh’s Managing Director Mike Pollok describes as leading edge.

“As a technology company, Ricoh couldn’t look past the opportunity to support an innovative platform like AttitudeLive.

“The team behind AttitudeLive has brought a number of smarts to the table including best practices in adaptive bitrates and mobile and tablet support. This means it won’t matter what your connection speed or what device you have available, you'll still be able to watch the Paralympics live or on-demand,” says Pollok.

“In addition, they have employed responsive design that will automatically resize to fit any screen, be it a desktop computer, tablet or phone, which means there’s no ‘pinch and zoom’ required to get to the content you want,” he adds.

AttitudeLive will deliver video content in H.264 thus supporting iOS and Android devices for both live streaming and on-demand content.

Angus Blair, Product Manager for AttitudeLive, says the site has been developed with an accessibility focus from the outset.

“We have captioning on all of our documentaries to aid the hearing impaired, and all new documentary content, including our Paralympic documentaries, will be available with audio descriptions so they can be more readily enjoyed by the vision impaired community as well.

“From day one we worked to structure our content and design around accessibility principles, which meant testing extensively with actual users of all major screen readers and assistive devices,” says Blair.

The Sochi 2014 Paralympic Winter Games began at 0500 New Zealand time on Saturday, 8 March. Attitude Pictures will air 44 hours of free coverage, highlights packages and documentaries on competing athletes from the games (March 7 - 16), via www.attitudelive.com

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