Telco France Telecom, through its Orange and GlobeCast business units, will once again supply a range of telecommunications service for the 2009 Tour de France cycling epic. The 23-day, 2,000-mile competition, kicked off July 4th.
Versus, sports-oriented cable television network in the United States, owned by Comcast, will carry the event. Versus will air the race in HD for the first time, with an average of 13 hours of race action per day. Versus will split between their live coverage in the morning and their “enhanced” primetime coverage in the evenings.
Orange will deploy fiber-optic cable along the entire race route, providing bandwidth of 155 megabits per second in both finish zones, and will also supply an enterprise-class Wi-Fi network to support the press and all other professionals working on the Tour. Orange will also give consumers the full Tour experience through exclusive high-quality content across its TV, PC and mobile platforms. GlobeCast – a subsidiary of France Telecom – is the world’s largest provider of satellite transmission and production services for professional broadcast, enterprise multimedia and Internet content delivery.
In related news, High Road Sports and HTC announced a partnership to prominently place the HTC brand at the starting line of the 2009 Tour de France, on July 4 in Monaco.
Previously called Columbia-Highroad, the Team Columbia-HTC biking team claims to have the most victories in professional cycling. HTC’s brand value through the sport of cycling is one step in HTC’s commitment to increasing its global brand value and recognition, said Peter Chou, CEO of cell phone maker HTC. HTC is promoting their new Android line of phones including their new Android-based HTC Hero.
Everyone on the team bus seems to be twittering using their HTC smart phones.
Adrian Ludwig from Adobe recently demoed Flash Player running inside of the new HTC Hero web browser. This makes the HTC Hero the first Android smartphone with Flash.
Adobe’s press release says Adobe’s Flash Platform, as part of the Open Screen Project will bring games and enhanced graphics to smartphones.
A new video game, Pro Cycling Manager – Tour de France 2009 (right), was released last month by Cyanide Studios.
Cycling Manager puts you in the shoes of the general manager of one of the 65 official cycling teams and asks you to handle everyday aspects of this position. Choice of the teams, transfers, trainings, finances, gear or searches for new talent, many various missions are required to position the most competitive team on the starting line.
Tour de France 2009 (left) is also available as an official mobile game.
