IKO Poland SRL operates sports channels across Europe and needed to stabilize live contribution over the public Internet while preserving broadcast‑grade quality for partners.
About IKO Poland SRL
Based in Bucharest, Romania, IKO Poland SRL runs 24/7 sports television brands Sportklub and Fightklub, featuring premium live events from around the world. The company distributes channels across Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and other European markets.
Challenge
With a growing number of live video contributions over the public Internet, IKO Poland SRL needed a flexible and reliable solution to:
- Receive live feeds from events over public Internet and satellite using SRT, HLS, and RTMP
- Remotely manage reception infrastructure and reconfigure it fully off‑site
- Reliably deliver linear TV channels to cable operators, TV and OTT platforms across Europe
Evaluation
The engineering team evaluated several approaches for reliable reception into playout and studio:
- Connecting the video mixer directly to sources via SRT
- Using an SRT‑to‑UDP gateway
- Deploying a dedicated hardware decoder (SRT/HLS/RTMP in, SDI out) from a leading vendor
The largest challenge was inconsistency of incoming feeds from different distributors, varying in:
- Resolution
- Frame rate
- GOP size
- Codecs and other key parameters
This variability caused intermittent reception/decoding issues, especially when streams exhibited:
- Continuity Counter (CC) errors (packet reordering, duplication, or loss)
- Invalid or unstable PCR (repetitions or clock variation)
- Unstable Inter‑packet Arrival Time (IAT)
- Unstable stream bitrate
None of the tested approaches reliably handled all feeds, especially those out of spec with industry standards.
IKO chose the Quickstream Node media gateway together with the Quickstream Cloud management layer. To neutralize input variability, Quickstream Node was configured to receive and transcode all inputs to a stable, standards‑compliant output. The resulting signal was error‑free, constant bitrate (CBR), with stable IAT.
Results
Quickstream Node enabled reliable reception and transcoding of all incoming streams and delivery to multiple locations, including the playout facility and TV studio. The normalized output was accepted by all downstream devices.
With Quickstream Cloud, the team can:
- Manage multiple distributed Quickstream Nodes from a single, easy‑to‑use dashboard
- Configure inputs from diverse content providers
- Monitor live feed performance and health
- Maximize reliability with primary/backup source configuration
Why IKO Poland SRL chose Quickstream
- Solved all live feed reception issues
- Cost‑effective solution
- User‑friendly software and operations
- High‑quality 24/7 technical support
Customer testimonial
As an operations manager, I am responsible for designing efficient and cost‑effective technical and organizational workflows. I am a big fan of innovative, cloud‑enabled solutions like Quickstream. It changed the way we manage our infrastructure, saving us time and money.
— Władysław Prażmowski, Operations Manager, IKO Poland SRL
