A hybrid of expertise results in Arqiva's hybrid "OTT Live" solution
The experts at Arqiva, Media Excel and Garland worked together to meet one customer’s demand for UHD and HD HEVC encoded streams, and now business is booming.
Amsterdam(15 Sep 2017)
A sign of excellence in collaboration and industry leadership is the ability to take an already acclaimed solution and continue to make new and exciting enhancements that will open up new business. Such is the case when three renown organisations with expertise in IP streaming — Arqiva, Media Excel and Garland — who worked together so Arqiva could build their ‘OTT Live’ fully managed hybrid OTT Service offering Arqiva, a leading communications infrastructure company, has been using Media Excel’s HERO encoders/transcoders to support its IP streaming solution for almost three years. They had originally been looking for a flexible and robust IP streaming platform to deliver a broadcast-quality service at a competitive cost per channel.
Digital video solutions provider, Garland, who have been supplying technology to Arqiva for eight years, worked closely with Arqiva to supply the HERO solution. Media Excel’s HERO is a multi-format, scalable transcoding platform that combines the ability to do live and file-based workflows in the same platform. Coupled with powerful management and redundancy systems, it provides the flexibility, density and high-quality transcoding required by today’s media companies.
Arqiva’s IP streaming solution can be easily integrated into its media management and occasional use service, so broadcasters can either deliver the content directly to its consumers, or use the solution as a confidence feed to securely monitor existing services, to ensure a high quality managed service. Additionally, with the Media Excel solution, Arqiva now has the flexibility to build and virtualise real-time ‘Live to VoD services’, plus layer in advanced quality-of-service and monitoring features to give its customers new commercial models and greater audience reach. Arqiva's global reach and diverse customer base dictate the need for a versatile architecture that can scale in terms of density, workflow type and form factor without compromising the quality of experience.
“The speed at which our industry is evolving dictates the need for a versatile product as well as for a responsive partner, says Nikos Kyriopoulos, Product Director at Media Excel. “Several unique features in Media Excel's product portfolio originated from partner/customer input. Arqiva's scientists and sales team have contributed substantially to our product development roadmap, for the short and the long term. A good example of this is the UHD HEVC ingest capability for our HERO multi-screen transcoder.”
“The Hybrid OTT Service Arqiva can now offer is an on-premise plus virtual infrastructure (the”hybrid”) that allows them to deliver highly redundant workflows with disaster recovery sites, says Lorna Garrett, Commercial Director at Garland. “This satisfies even the most-demanding and high-profile services anywhere. By leveraging Media Excel's central management architecture and APIs across all encoders, however deployed, the service provides operational efficiency. Arqiva now have the versatility needed to deliver services confidently and quickly for Live, VoD, Live-to-VoD, and VoD-to-Live workflows.”
The results are already apparent — Arqiva’s OTT 'Managed Service' business is increasing especially amongst International customers. These include sports rights holders, multi-platform media companies and multi-channel broadcasters.
“Today, when you hear the word ‘hybrid,’ many think of a car that can run on more than one source of power,” says Alex Pannell, Media Services Director at Arqiva. “Our collaboration with Media Excel and Garland is similar in that it runs on the unique power each group brings to the table with their unique skill sets. The result is our successful and growing Hybrid OTT service.”
About Arqiva
Arqiva is a leading UK communications infrastructure and media services provider dedicated to connecting people wherever they are through the delivery of TV, radio, mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT). We are an independent provider of telecom towers, with circa 8,000 active sites across Great Britain, and are also the only supplier of national terrestrial television and radio broadcasting services in the UK. Our advanced networks support the exponential growth of connected devices and the ever-increasing demand for data from smartphones to tablets, connected TVs, smart meters, cars and medical devices. For more information, news and insights from Arqiva, please visit the website at: www.arqiva.com
About Garland
Garland is an established UK company working with leading suppliers of digital video streaming and IPTV solutions to deliver professional, end-to-end systems for many applications, including Internet TV, mobile TV, IPTV, and broadcast services. The company focuses on meeting customers’ system requirements, providing a full package of technical and commercial support with the best available products. Customers range in size and application, and Garland’s strength is its flexibility in matching the right technology to client needs. For more information, visit Garland at www.gpl-uk.co.uk
About Media Excel
Media Excel is the leading supplier of reliable software solutions for real-time multiscreen video delivery. Founded in 2000 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, the company has been the industry leader in the development of real-time video processing software to distribute video over IP networks. Solutions from Media Excel provide the reliability, scalability and performance required to deliver high quality video via appliance and cloud deployment models. Powering more than 350 million multiscreen subscribers worldwide, and with the #1 market share in multiscreen delivery for wireless carriers in North America, Media Excel assists Pay TV operators, content providers, broadcasters and telcos worldwide. To learn more, please visit www.mediaexcel.com