Globosat uses Elemental to stream summer’s biggest sports event
Roberto Primo, Globosat, Chief Technology Officer
Globosat, one of Latin America’s biggest pay TV players and Brazil’s leading multi-channel broadcaster and content provider, used Elemental video processing to stream live and video-on-demand (VOD) coverage, including catch-up TV functionality, of this summer’s biggest global sports event to its estimated 50 million subscribers.
Additionally, the Rio de Janeiro-based cable and satellite company plans to use solutions from Elemental to support the future deployment of SMPTE 2022-6 (SDI over IP) to efficiently transport media signals over IP networks for reduced complexity and cost.
“With Globosat’s unprecedented coverage of the competitions this summer, we are setting a new landmark to the live televised Olympic Games. Subscribers can have access to one hundred percent of the events – whenever they like and on whatever device they like,” said Roberto Primo, Chief Technology Officer for Globosat. “Elemental gives us the flexibility we need for our multi-channel, multi-platform approach to showing every moment of the action. The scalability of Elemental is also key.”
Multiple premier broadcasters, pay TV providers and sports programmers plan to use Elemental gear to power the streaming of this summer’s largest sporting event. Globosat is producing the worldwide signal for the event and is part of the Grupo Globo portfolio of media companies, which reach 99.7 percent of the Brazilian territory.
The Brazilian pay TV leader is broadcasting the sports event to its viewers in Brazil via satellite, cable, fibre, 3G, 4G networks and streaming live and VOD IP video channels. Globosat channels reach about 50 million viewers throughout the entire national territory, distributed to more than 16 million subscriber residences. According to Globosat, more than 17.2 million viewers watch its channels daily.
To meet massive consumer demand for live-streamed coverage of the events, Globosat is adding an additional eight high definition (HD) channels – for a total of 16 HD channels – to its output and an additional 40 services. Signals are generated at an international broadcast center located in the center of Rio de Janeiro and then transmitted to the Globosat broadcast center, also located in the city. Elemental Live software encodes the content for live over-the-top delivery, including programming in 4K. Elemental Live will also record and trim catch-up TV deliverables for distribution over different VOD platforms, including Net Brazil.
A further innovation on the part of Globosat is the use of IP transmission from the international broadcasting centre to the Globosat facility. The workflow employs both HD-SDI and SMPTE 2022-6, a standard for transporting high bitrate media signals over IP networks, to packetise and deliver 1.6 Gb/s streams for each channel over standard fibre, which reduces the capital cost of installing multiple dedicated video circuits.