Thomson outlines Behind Every Screen video delivery strategy
Thomson Video Networks has announced the launch of Behind Every Screen, a unified and intelligent video delivery approach that combines on-premises and cloud-based resources to support broadcast and multi-screen services.
Behind Every Screen brings together the latest ingest, branding, ad insertion, encoding/transcoding and packaging technologies to provide an all-encompassing video infrastructure with every key capability broadcasters need for profitable and convergent multi-platform video delivery.
Central to Behind Every Screen is the MediaFlex Suite, Thomson Video Networks’ unified service operation and management software suite. The MediaFlex Suite provides a software layer to facilitate overall service configuration, scheduling, and monitoring. This enables a greatly simplified operation in which branding and compression resources can be allocated based on priorities for deployment speed, video quality requirements, bandwidth optimisation and content customisation. Ultimately, the MediaFlex Suite will provide a unified view of the entire operation to streamline tasks such as migrating services between compression resources, deploying new services rapidly in a data centre, or extending file transcoding capabilities with external cloud resources.
“In order to stay profitable and compete effectively against new multi-screen players, today’s broadcasters and network operators must refine their business models. This requires the ability to operate in a unified video delivery environment that smoothly integrates both multi-screen and broadcast services while optimising operational costs,” said Christophe Delahousse, president, Thomson Video Networks.
“Previously, our customers had to make the trade-off between encoding performance (affecting video quality), cost per channel (affecting density), and CAPEX versus OPEX regarding cloud solutions. With Behind Every Screen, they no longer have to compromise on video quality and density, and they’re able to choose the mix of cloud or on-premises technologies that is most appropriate for a given project or service.”
Powered by the MediaFlex Suite and Thomson Video Networks compression solutions, Behind Every Screen meets several critical video delivery requirements for a modern broadcast operation. The approach delivers premium encoding capabilities along with dense transcoding for turnaround services through a combination of video-optimized hardware appliances, software-based encoders running on lower-cost and generic physical servers, virtualized servers, and a cloud infrastructure. As a result, network operators benefit from the advantages of virtualisation and cloud computing without having to abandon quality of service, SLAs, video quality and any of their other critical operational standards.
“Behind Every Screen you’ll find Thomson Video Networks,” Delahousse added. “Our people and technology drive the compression and video quality requirements of every device — today and tomorrow.”