Cgates goes live with Synamedia to futureproof OTT growth for live sports streaming
Synamedia is working with Lithuanian telecom company, Cgates, to futureproof over the top (OTT) pay TV services, including live sports streaming.
Cgates has gone live with Synamedia video network solutions across its pay TV services. These technologies will support live and time-shifted viewing on set top boxes and OTT, ensuring Cgates has the flexibility and scalability to meet its future growth plans while optimising the delivery of high quality video streaming across all platforms.
The telco is now working with Synamedia on future enhancements including low latency for live sports streaming, and disaster recovery.
During the first part of the engagement, Cgates went live with Synamedia virtualised DCM to support the encoding of its 200 cable channels, in HD and 4K. Cgates chose Synamedia’s DCM because it maximises picture quality yet minimises hardware requirements thanks to the provider’s Vivid Compression. By optimising bandwidth and latency with content-aware encoding, the virtualized DCM now delivers a superior viewing experience to Cgates’ subscribers, even at peak times.
Complementing the DCM, Cgates is now deploying Synamedia’s Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) headend, including packaging and storage for VoD and catch up, as well as Synamedia’s private CDN supporting both HLS and MPEG-DASH. By using Synamedia’s video network technologies for its entire delivery ecosystem, Cgates will give subscribers an immersive and consistent high quality viewing experience across its TV mobile app and its pay TV service including its new Android set top boxes.
An important factor in Cgates’ decisions was the cloud-native architecture of both the DCM and the ABR headend that gives it the flexibility to deploy on-premise then move to a hybrid or cloud models as required. Both also share the same easy-to-use interface that simplifies configuration and uses Synamedia Video Services Manager (VSM) to provision and manage cloud resources.
Tomas Burovas, CEO at Cgates, commented: “With bold plans to grow our services, particularly streaming, we needed a technology partner who could share our vision with future-proofed, flexible, scalable solutions. Synamedia stands out from the crowd with its attention to innovation, particularly its latest compression techniques.”
Added Marius Dabrisius, CTO at Cgates: “As a technology partner Synamedia went above and beyond our expectations. For example, we wanted a special feature for when time-shifted content is presented to the player. None of the vendors we were talking to had this feature. We were blown away when Synamedia’s engineering team developed the feature for us in less than a week.”
Synamedia worked with its regional partner Scansatec for the Cgates’ deployment. Based in Finland, Scansatec specialises in pre-sales, integration and support for video solutions across the Baltics and Nordics.
Julien Signès, senior vice president and general manager, video network at Synamedia, concluded: “We get a lot of attention for our big name customer wins, but our powerful yet cost effective solutions are also well suited to smaller and medium sized video service providers. By deploying our video network solutions across its entire data plane, Cgates is optimising the delivery of quality video today and is primed for the next stage of its growth.”