Technicolor Partners with Telestream and Vivesta to Provide Fastest Solution for Catch-up TV for Dutch National Broadcasters
Background
Encoding and distribution of Catch-up TV service for the Dutch Public Broadcast organization (also known as NPO - Nederlandse Publieke Omroep) is a service which Technicolor, a Thomson Business Group, has provided for many years.
The Challenge
New customer demands required a different architecture and a state-of-the-art video capture and transcoding platform. The project’s goal was to have 95% of video-on-demand (VOD) and Web content for the broadcaster’s service available within 10 minutes of the end of a broadcast program. This meant that the project’s capture and transcode system had to complete its work within 2-3 minutes.
The Solution
Partnering with Telestream and Vivesta, Technicolor was able to provide a new fully automated transcoding service which generates fast VOD and Web publishing for NPO – within NPO’s stringent 10-minute requirement. Telestream’s
transcode while ingest solution was a key component in meeting this speed requirement in a cost-efficient manner.The new system enables NPO to publish broadcast content from the three Dutch public TV channels (Nederland 1, 2 and 3) to multiple outlets (digital cable, IPTV and FTTH) via its Catch-up TV service which allows VOD viewing within 10 minutes of a show’s broadcast on-air time.
The solution consists of products and services from Telestream and Vivesta, where Telestream delivers video capture and transcoding products and Vivesta delivers the automation and workflow management solution. Combined, these services enable high-speed Web publishing in a fully automated workflow for Catch-up TV.
Technicolor is responsible for project management, consultancy, architecture and migration of the existing Catch-up TV service, reporting and end-to-end integration of the new platform in the current broadcast facility.
System integration is provided by Vivesta to ensure a fully automated workflow, from ingest to content delivery, and reporting. This includes integration of Vivesta’s MediaFlow media management and automation solution with program metadata management systems, playout data and Telestream’s Pipeline capture and FlipFactory transcode systems.
The workflow consists of capturing multiple national TV program feeds from the broadcasters using two Telestream Pipeline Quad video capture systems. Content is automatically delivered to four Telestream FlipFactory systems for concurrent, high-speed transcoding to multiple web formats: MPEG-2, Windows Media, QuickTime and 3GP. The reformatted content is then delivered to multiple VOD outlets, including the most popular public broadcast VOD site in the Netherlands, Uitzending Gemist.
It was important to the success of this project that Vivesta be able to integrate dynamically with the existing broadcast systems, including Omnibus and the program management system, to ensure that content published to the web was fully copyright-cleared before output. Vivesta utilized Telestream’s SDK integration software to ensure complete control of the content capture and transcode processes. Seamless communication paths between Vivesta and Telestream systems ensure a totally automated, hands-off system.
The Result
"We recognized NPO’s business need to get its Catch-Up TV content to the web as fast as possible" said Chuck Parker, President Technicolor Digital Content Delivery. "By working with Telestream and Vivesta, we have been able to deliver this live content to VOD in record time, which demonstrates our strategy to deliver video content in any format in a fast and efficient way."
