London: - Allsport, the world's number one sports photo agency, relied on the Vio service last month to relay a total of 8,000 images of the Olympic Games from the Allsport operations center in Sydney to its offices in Los Angeles and London. Each day for three weeks, from the Opening Ceremonies to the last event, Vio carried 500 to 600 pictures for Allsport - some of them weighing in at more than two megabytes even after compression. The goal in Sydney was to capture the headline-hitting moments for Allsport's publishing clients worldwide, as well as to generate the more individual sports shots which are an integral part of Allsport's offering to its customers. These include the event's corporate sponsors, approved clothing and equipment manufacturers and the individual sports governing bodies. To meet this challenge, Allsport fielded a team of 50 people to cover the Games, including staff photographers, editors, librarians and technicians. They worked from the dedicated Allsport office with processing, editing, scanning and communication facilities, set up at the Press Centre in Sydney specifically for the event. Allsport's Global Joint Managing Director, Adrian Murrell, himself an award-winning sports photographer, viewed the 2000 Olympics as the first Olympic Games to be truly influenced by the explosion of digital technology and the Internet. "We knew that advances in digital image capture would revolutionize the way we worked in Sydney, and that a lot of photojournalists and freelancers at the event would be clamoring to use the Internet to transmit digital images back to base," Murrell observes. "But at Allsport, we had some deep-seated concerns about the reliability of that method. About 2,000 photographers covered the Games, so traffic volumes were huge, and in our business, it only takes minutes to miss a vital deadline." Through high speed Vio DGN leased line connections in Sydney, London and Los Angeles, Allsport transmitted the edited news images to its London and LA offices and forwarded them to the picture desks of most major national and provincial newspapers. Images also were made available to Allsport's agents worldwide, and were routed into the company's five-million-strong picture archives in the UK and the USA, where they became accessible to customers browsing the library online through www.allsport.com. "During the Olympics, the Internet was often totally saturated - and at one point it was inaccessible for a couple of hours," said Allsport UK Systems Administrator, Dave Rossi. "With Vio we kept sending images, which allowed us to compete with major news organizations including Reuters and AP that use satellite transmission for file delivery." "We signed up for Vio pretty late in the game and there was no time to get our customers to sign up," Rossi continued. "Our view is to use Vio for any major event and to have our customers use it so we can benefit from Vio's automated job management and tracking applications. But even without that advantage, Vio was indispensable."