Horse & Country TV jumps into the cloud

Horse & Country TV, the specialist international equestrian sports and lifestyle network, and cloud-based broadcasting platform Amagi have announced successful broadcast of The Rolex Grand Prix Live to homes in the UK using Amagi Cloudport. “At Horse & Country TV, we strive to be in the vanguard of adopting new and efficient technologies such as the Cloudport infrastructure for broadcasting. Along with our playout partner Amagi, we have now demonstrated to the broadcast industry that live events can be managed by remote playout systems,” said Heather Killen, CEO and chairman of Horse & Country TV.

The CHIO World Equestrian Festival held at Aachen in July was the first event of the Rolex Grand Prix series, attracting over 40,000 spectators and millions watching on TV. This was the first time that the event was broadcast live in the UK. The entire playout was managed remotely by Amagi from its operations center in Bangalore, India.

“Managing live feeds, inserting graphics, and dynamically altering the playlist based on how an event unfolds is complex, especially when the playout is managed remotely. We are breaking new ground with this innovation on the Cloudport platform. We are quite delighted with the flawless telecast of the live event on Horse & Country TV,” said Srividhya Srinivasan, co-founder and CTO, Amagi Media Labs.

Amagi’s Cloudport platform encompasses remote channel management tools, a cloud-enabled delivery and playout management hub, and remote playout servers at the edges. John Wallace, founder of Wallace Broadcasting and technical advisor to Horse & Country TV said, “We chose the Amagi channel playout platform as it gave us the flexibility to cost-effectively manage localised playout of different H&C TV channels in individual countries. We now have the desired flexibility and robustness even for live events. Our teams are quite pleased with the event broadcast.”