The Olympic Project (Olympics Multimedia Personalised for the Internet Community) of the IST (Information Society Technologies) Programme was initiated in December 2001, with the objectives of definition, implementation and integration of solutions for acquisition network, encoding and distribution of hundreds of streams of audio and video in real time on the global Internet. The system developed supports IP multicast in heterogeneous environments. The project was finalised in July 2004 and had the following participants: Sema Group (Spain), Siemens ICN (Italy), ICCS - National Technical University of Athens, Hellenic Telecommunications Organisation, OTE Net (Greece), Thomcast (France), INESC Inovação (Portugal) and Telecom Italia Lab (Italy).