About VIEW MEDIA
View Media provides end-to-end managed services for linear and social media channels allowing customers to experience excellent multi-screen and multi-device viewing.
Over the last 15 years View Media established itself as a reputable, trusted media broadcast service provider. View Media is dedicated to providing cost-effective broadcast solutions accompanied by round the clock monitoring and support of on-air services.
View Media challenge - how to deliver channels and save energy?
View Media operates an infrastructure that is processing hundreds of linear channels. The channels are often received from different content providers located across the globe. Before sending a channel to the uplink facility, all channel feeds are required to comply with strict broadcasting standards. Unfortunately not all content providers are able to deliver content compliant with TR 101 290 standard and provide feeds in required resolution, frame rate, GoP size, etc. Therefore it is often required to receive and transcode channels before further distribution.
View Media was looking for a new solution to replace old-fashioned, power inefficient hardware decoders and encoders. The company was looking for a software solution to:
- Receive linear channels and live events from content providers using SRT protocol
- Transcode TV feeds to desirable resolution and parameters and make sure the streams always meet all industry standards
- Better manage reception infrastructure and be able to change the configuration fully remotely
- Design new workflow so it is fully redundant with an ability for automatic switchover to backup feeds in case of any network or hardware problems
Evaluation
In preparation for the infrastructure upgrade View Media build a highly reliable, fully redundant, and scalable virtual computing cluster. The cluster was planned for use in the new infrastructure. View Media needed to evaluate different software solutions for linear and live channel reception and transcoding. Various solutions were tested including open-source tools (ts-duck, ffmpeg, srt-live-transmit) and professional broadcast software for a channel transcoding from the leading industry vendors.
Open-source tools did not meet View Media expectations. srt-live transmit command line tool provided only basic srt to udp conversion with no transcoding support or any required features like monitoring, remote management, reporting, watchdog, active/backup switchover and others. Command line tools like fmpeg and ts-duck turned out to be very flexible but failed to properly transcode streams with stable CBR output and consistent IAT. Moreover many other management features were missing.
Commercial software solutions were lacking in features or the costs were too high for the relevant services and markets.
The result
Quickstream solution was tested and met all expectations. Quickstream was able to transcode more than 40 streams to H.264 with MPEG-TS over UDP stream output. The output met all expectations including stable IAT, constant bitrate (CBR) and compliance with TR 101 290 norm.
Stable IAT from the transcoded stream provided by Quickstream Node.
IPTV probe showing the quality Quickstream Node output signal transcoded from a problematic input streaming described above.
Why View Media chose Quickstream
Features of Quickstream solution:
- Cost-effective and flexible.
- Runs on Windows/Linux in virtualized environments.
- Compatibility with other SRT based solutions.
- Effective communication and support.
- Multi-channel transcoding.
- High-density and energy-efficient
- Ability to design the system without a single point of failure (SPOF).
Project facts
View Media used Quickstream in the infrastructure and managed to:
- Saved up to 60% in energy costs.
- Transcode more than 40 channels on the virtual cluster.
- Replaced legacy infrastructure and saved data-center space.
- Improved reliability.
- Improved time efficiency by distribution network management from central web interface using Quickstream Cloud.
Customer about us
With Quickstream, we were able to upgrade our infrastructure quickly and efficiently. As a result, we have improved the reliability of our systems, simplified its management and saved on energy costs.
