Interview: Arqiva’s Gaurav Jandwani talks cloud, monetisation and customer experience

Jo Ruddock speaks to Gaurav Jandwani, executive director, media & broadcast at global broadcast technology company Arqiva, about the key challenges facing content producers, Arqiva’s offering and  turning proofs of concept into customer opportunities.

Headquartered in the UK, Arqiva is a critical network infrastructure provider, offering services to all the UK PSPs and major media brands, primarily across three areas – transmission services, capacity and as a managed service player.

“Effectively, our our work can be split into three – we are into content distribution, content processing, and we put a service wrap around it because most of our customers buy a portfolio of service, but they expect us to monitor and manage the services for them,” explains Jandwani.

As in every area of the broadcast sector, there are, of course, challenges being faced by Arqiva’s customers.

He adds: “I think from a content distribution perspective, whether you are a channel distributor, or whether you’re a sports league or a rights owner, there are a few challenges. Of course, in this environment, cost effectiveness is a key challenge for everybody. Whether you distribute a channel, or if you want to run live sports, the first thing is you want to be multimodal, or have the ability to actually distribute your content across satellite, fibre, cloud, but do it in a manner that is seamless, scalable and flexible.

“The second is that you want to try out new monetisation opportunities, but not do so in a manner which is both privative from an operational rigour perspective or if you want to try out new areas, new markets, you want to be able to do it on the fly. And third, we are ultimately in the business of selling two things, which is content and experience. The experience layer is pretty critical. So you want to do it in a manner where customers can actually experience the whole breadth and quality of the content. So, for example, you don’t expect anything that you watch on TV to stutter or buffer. You shouldn’t expect that to stutter or buffer when it’s streaming either. So I think those are the three areas around it. There is the seamlessness of it, to be able to either reduce costs or augment revenue, and then do it in a manner where the experience that you deliver is optimal and par excellence.”

Arqiva has a number of tools and large amounts of knowledge on hand to help customers overcome these challenges.

“We are in the space of content distribution, content processing and managed service,” Jandwani continues. “Although everybody knows us as a company which is very strongly recognised in linear broadcast, whether that’s TV or radio, now with the advent of cloud-native technologies, our ability to move is significantly augmented.”

He takes sports as an example. “We’ve been in this area for 30-odd years; our capabilities are global. The whole multimodal nature of it, we have access to teleports in Europe, the US and Asia. We actually have access to major fibre Meet Me points. And, of course, all of that is integrated into our global fibre and satellite network, Arqnet, which is about 200-280 POPS globally. But what we have done to augment this is invest in a product called Arqade, which is a cloud-native product built on AWS, which is again integrated into Arqnet. This allows us to offer something called pay-per-use self-serve content distribution as a service.”

Jandwani gives the example of a leading sports broadcaster in South Africa.

“SuperSport has been a client of Arqiva since 2007,” He says. “And what we do for them is we pick up 150-200 feeds a week, whether it’s from BT in the UK, or Formula One from Sky – it could be anything – and then we aggregate it, we mux all of that and we have a dedicated fibre network to Johannesburg. That is where we actually carry sporting events into South Africa.”

He continues: “And similarly, for sports rightsholders, as opposed to broadcasters, Arqade allows them to actually do multi-affiliate distribution over the cloud and do it in a manner which they completely manage by themselves.”

“Although everybody knows us as a company which is very strongly recognised in linear broadcast, whether that’s TV or radio, now with the advent of cloud-native technologies, our ability to move is significantly augmented”

Arqade is a proprietary product, built on AWS’s MediaLive and Media Connect services.

“It allows you every kind of flexibility,” says Jandwani. “You actually pay for it when you use it. So again, going back to the three challenges that I address, you can see, this is market based, it allows you to explore new markets, but you don’t have to invest in satellite and fibre and plan months in advance, you can actually do it on an ad hoc basis.

“We do similar things with NBC, Warner Bros. Discovery – we actually distribute channels for them across multiple affiliates, whether they want that done across fibre, satellite, or more recently, more and more people want to do it to the cloud.”

“Other areas of work are we operate a headend as a service, and it’s a unified broadcast and OTT headend,” he continues. “In the past, we would actually have run two separate infrastructure, one for linear broadcast and one for OTT. But if we look at what TV operators have to do today, for example say Sky in the UK, where you can actually get your Netflix subscription or any other subscription as part of your Sky package, they’re expecting this boundary between broadcast and OTT to blur. Our product, Arqplex, it’s built on MediaKind, but Arqiva’s reliability underpins it and we provide that as a service. And that’s something that, again, SuperSport uses.”

The innovation doesn’t stop there, however. “More recently, we invested in Arqedge, which is a hybrid CDM product, which lends itself to the point I made around experience. This is primarily a UK focus right now. It’s something which is particularly relevant for a sports streaming platform, because it enables you to get all the benefits that you see with your private CDN, but have the ability to access a public CDN and switch between them when your load requires you to do. So, if you’re a sports streamer in the UK, and you have England playing Croatia in the World Cup semifinal, there is no way you can predict traffic, and how many people will actually line up to watch that particular event. And it could mean a pretty unpleasant surprise for a CFO the next month. But with Arqedge, you can actually have a significant level of broadcast predictability, you can balance load it. That’s a product that we created in partnership with MainStreaming. So those are a few ways we actually address the challenges that are described.”

Looking to the future and it’s clear that the focus will be on real-world deployments for the Arq Suite of products.

He concludes: “Our intent really is to make sure that we take these to market and we actually translate a lot of these proofs of concept that we’ve done and a lot of conversations that we’re having into actual customer opportunities. We are currently doing a number of proofs of concept with sports broadcasters, sports rights owners, especially for Arqade. We are under deployment for two or three really major Arcplex deployments, and in the UK we have a working group that we formed for UK-based streamers to try out Arcedge and to come together and address the challenge of streaming at scale.”