Archdiocese of New York Broadcasted Online with Level 3

Level 3 Communications (News - Alert), a provider of fiber-based communications services, recently aired New Yorkers, as well as other interested online viewers, a live online broadcasting of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York.

Company officials said that it delivered video backhaul, encoding, caching, streaming as well as storage services, in order to support the online viewing of the live event, which was held on April 15, 2009 at Saint Patrick's Cathedral church.

Level 3 leveraged its CDN service to broadcast the content to its online audiences. The company’s video broadcast services were used to acquire and backhaul broadcast signal from Saint Patrick's Cathedral and delivered it to the company’s broadcast encoding center. The signal was then fully encoded and delivered to online audiences using the company’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) service.

The Content Delivery Network offerings by Level 3 are based on the company’s patented footprint content delivery technology. Proactively capable of scaling edge server resources, the CDN services help customers to meet real-time usage demands. The CDN’s flexible capacity model is specifically developed to facilitate greater operational cost-efficiencies as well as improve site and video delivery performance, said company officials.

The Archbishop Timothy Dolan was named the new Archbishop of New York by Pope Benedict XVI on February 23.

"Level 3 provided the end-to-end video delivery expertise we needed for this landmark event," said Joseph Zwilling of the Archdiocese of New York. "The online streaming video experience provided people from all over the country and around the world with a new and important way to experience the installation of an Archbishop of New York for the first time in history."

"It is a great pleasure for Level 3 to be supporting the first online delivery of such an important and historical event," said Mark Taylor, senior vice president of Level 3's Content Markets Group. "We're also glad that the Archdiocese found value in our end-to-end solution for media delivery that combines our proven video broadcast and content delivery network services."

Level 3 Communications offers metro and long-haul services, including transport, data, Internet, content delivery and voice. Various enterprises, contents, wholesalers and government organizations are its customers.