The Tour de France is a three-week long bicycle race with a fanatical following that stretches across 2,000 miles of rural roadways. Broadcasters can't afford to get cameras everywhere they would like, but new technology is allowing for better coverage by leveraging photos and videos captured by fans on their mobile devices.
"No network can put cameras out across an entire race," Danielson says. "But now we've got systems where that consumer-generated content can be uploaded to a broadcaster's site. This technology is new and challenging. It's one thing for 1,000 phones to shoot footage, but the question is how quickly can you get it to a broadcast center and transcode it into a format that broadcast can work with?"