We’re proud to be delivering live and on demand streams for UEFA Euro 2008 with our partner, Geißendörfer & Leschinsky GmbH (G&L). G&L holds the online broadcast rights for Germany, and through our partnership we are making available live online streams of every football match (or soccer, for you Americans) aired on the German TV channel, ‘Das Erste.’

G&L shared with us some of their most recent numbers: For the 9 June matches between Rumania and France and the Netherlands and Italy, 33,000 viewers watched them online. This is a very significant number in Germany, and it comes even with the TV broadcast getting over 50% market share for the same contests.

“This is an extraordinary live stream rating,”said Alexander Leschinsky, manager of the responsible system house at G&L.

For G&L, Limelight Networks is providing live streams in both Windows Media and Flash formats in three different quality settings. Using our optical network, we are bypassing the congestion of the Internet cloud within Germany, and delivering those streams directly to the last-mile networks we connect with in the country. This means the video bits almost never hit the public Internet.

We encourage you to check out these broadcasts by visiting G&L’s site, the ‘ARD,’ at http://sport.ard.de. There’s even an on-demand archive called mediathek that will serve up replays of the past games.

See you at the finals on 29 June!