Haivision and iStreamPlanet Go Live for Olympics Streaming
Haivision has partnered with iStreamPlanet to deliver live streaming and cross-platform playback for a number of broadcasters during the London Olympics.
Rights holders on board include Caribbean sportscaster SportsMax, with others to be announced soon.
"We've invested a couple thousand man hours in R&D infrastructure, software development, and implementation," says Haivision CMO Peter Maag.
The set-up is located at iStreamPlanet's European broadcast operations housed inside Interxion's London Data centre.
For the service, marketed as Go Live, Haivision is supplying front-end acquisition and encoding technology, as well as a bespoke player. iStreamPlanet is supplying the middle section of multiplatform managed broadcast solutions.
"This is an end-to-end solution taken from signal acquisition to player and capitalises on a trend we see increasing going forward which is to fulfill the needs of rights holding broadcasters (RHBs) who aren't prepared for, or don't have long term investment plans, to handle multiple channels to multiple devices," says Khurram Siddiqui, vice president and general manager Europe for iStreamPlanet.
"Here is an opportunity to leverage central resources that a broadcaster may not be equipped to provide a solution for, to help them face the tremendous OTT challenge that the Olympics brings," he adds. "We're providing RHBs the ability to leverage the latest technology and operational tips and tricks to deliver the best internet viewing experience on the planet."
Maag adds: "Fundamentally, we have established an infrastructure and automated video workflow that can be used by multiple broadcasters where they don't have to invest heavily in server farms and technology and don't need to have the expertise to pull it off. A lot of people come undone trying to manage that kind of digital workflow."
The partners are effectively acting as a proxy agent on behalf of RHB clients, working with Olympic Broadcast Services to pull official Olympic video and data feeds from satellite into the London facility where they are aggregated, quality controlled, and piped to Haivision Kulabyte encoders.
Once washed through Kulabyte, the encoded feeds are pushed out to Akamai's secure HD CDN with appropriate geoblocks, and streamed direct to the target audience profiled for smartphone, tablet, computer, and so on.
Viewers will be able to register for the service from each broadcaster online, select from multiple live streams, and use DVR and social media functions.
"This is the first instance where we can leverage our joint resources and we have uncovered something of strength here that can be marketed and wholesaled for any project where a signal can be acquired and a RHB has not built out the infrastructure," says Maag.
iStreamPlanet has been the technological driving force behind streaming media firsts at high visibility events before, including previous Olympics in Vancouver and Beijing as well as the 2012 Super Bowl.
iStreamPlanetR helped to develop the content acquisition, encoding, and CDN ingest for NBC's online coverage of Vancouver winter Games. The raw video feeds came from Vancouver through NBC's facilities in New York City and onward to iStreamPlanet's facilities in Las Vegas, Nevada, where the company encoded and distributed up to 24 high definition feeds.
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