Telstra expands offering to broadcasters through MediaCloud acquisition with UK Broadcast Operations Centre

Telstra’s Broadcast operations Centre (BOC) in Sydney, Australia

Through its recent acquisition of MediaCloud, Telstra Broadcast Services (TBS) has announced it has expanded on its investments in the European market with the opening of the former MediaCloud broadcast operations centre (BOC), situated in London’s Docklands.

The acquisition of MediaCloud’s business and assets included the London broadcast operations centre previously operated and owned by Deluxe Broadcast Services.

Located in Telstra’s London Hosting Centre, the BOC will host a master control room (MCR), office space, and lab plus workshop area designed to facilitate tests and builds.

The low latency, high proximity BOC has been designed specifically for live video productions and will assist in managing and monitoring content to and from Telstra’s EMEA customers 24/7 on the company’s global fibre, satellite, internet, and partner networks.

Anna Lockwood, head of global sales, TBS, told SVG Europe: “Expanding our broadcast operations in Telstra’s London Hosting Centre sets us up to meet the evolving needs of our growing global client base. The MediaCloud acquisition provided us with a team of broadcast experts currently delivering over 21 million hours of IP-based live video per year and 2,500 IP-based live video streams every day. Telstra’s London Hosting Centre was chosen because it has the capacity to scale, carrier-neutral for colocation, and provides secure connectivity between customer sites.”

The BOC is also designed to provide localised monitoring, alerting, routing, and switching of Telstra’s leading services to the broadcast community, including the company’s Internet Delivery Network, Global Media Network, and Special Events Network. Moreover, following the MediaCloud acquisition in June, TBS also has the advantage of using the MediaCloud team’s considerable experience in managing and monitoring internet delivery networks.

Continuing, Lockwood explained what the new site will enable TBS to do for its clients above and beyond what it already provides: “Telstra Broadcast Services delivers content globally for the world’s biggest media companies, covering some of the world’s highest-profile events. The global reach of Telstra Broadcast Services means business continuity is managed in regions closer to customers. The tendency has been for most service providers to consolidate their customer support into central locations. However, many Telstra customers want them as a partner in-region, particularly in the US, Europe, and Asia.

“It’s critical that all our Broadcast Operation Centres are working collaboratively for the good of the customer. Telstra Broadcast Services’ global assurance strategy incorporates operational efficiencies with a distributed support platform, which includes distributed master control rooms, a distributed bookings capability and distributed field operations. The power of distributed services means you don’t have to reproduce hardware-based services in every region you’re serving,” notes Lockwood.

She continues: “We are dealing with a variety of customers across a wide geography, which requires good coordination and alignment of processes and tools, including a single, shared scheduling system worldwide.”

The facility and service assurance will be managed by the elite team at TBS who are industry experts with decades of combined experience in ensuring the right blend of networks, technology, and services for global broadcasters, rights-holders, and sporting bodies.

The new facility also provides access to Telstra’s Pittsburgh BOC and Hong Kong BOC, which is conveniently located in Telstra’s Stanley Teleport, where the company’s media experts help ensure streamlined inter-connectivity between satellites, global subsea cable systems, and the terrestrial IP network.

Together with Telstra’s Sydney BOC, the four centres have the capability to allow Telstra Broadcast Services to offer global coverage and 24/7 global service assurance for customers.

“Telstra Broadcast Services already manages over 400 satellite, media, and data services, as well as overseeing three million permanent channel hours and 20,000 ad hoc event bookings every year,” commented Andreas Eriksson, head of TBS. “By increasing our investment in London with this new facility, we are demonstrating our commitment to the European market and providing exactly the sort of low latency high-quality services both in and out of Europe that the industry, and the sports and live events sectors, in particular, are demanding.”

TBS and PSSI Global Services announced in early July that they were working together on a BOC at PSSI’s Pittsburgh, US facility that allows TBS to add US-based managed services including operations, monitoring, bookings, and technical services to its overall Global Media Network (GMN) offerings. Read more here.