Late & Live success sees ITV renewing partnership with M2A Media

Further to the development and deployment of M2A Media’s Live Capture in the roll out of ITV’s Late & Live solution, the broadcaster has renewed its contract with the company for a further 12 months.

Live Capture was originally chosen by ITV to change the way the broadcaster’s catch-up assets are created for live programmes. Realising the need for a simple workflow that would run in public cloud, receive high quality live streams, frame accurately trim live programmes and deliver platform ready assets along with the source material, ITV researched many technology solutions that could implement such a system.

Following a successful proof of concept, the UK broadcaster chose Live Capture to move its Late & Live workflow into the cloud, thus enabling its viewers to catch-up with programmes more quickly after the end of transmission.

M2A Media’s Live Capture service continues to enable ITV to capture live content and deliver to both its own-operated and third party OTT platforms. The service includes continual assessments and updates, providing ITV with the following benefits:

• Input source — 100Mbps AVCi stream, received from an AWS Elemental encoder
• All five ITV channels (ITV 1/ITV 2/ITV 3/ITV 4 & ITVBe) are ingested by the M2A service
• VoD assets are delivered within 10 minutes of confirmation by an ITV editor
• All channels have dual resilience and in addition to ITV’s linear channels, M2A Media’s Live Capture solution is configured to receive two ‘Event’ channels, in readiness for the ad hoc ingest of off-schedule events, such as pay-per-view boxing.
• Each ITV channel is configured with a rolling 48 hour cache, which allows ITV operators to capture programmes broadcast within the previous 48 hours.
• Added this year is an archive purge functionality to manage storing and stream switching.
• Live programmes are edited manually by an ITV operator, via the Capture tool of the M2A Console. The Capture tool uses all the main functionalities of a non-linear editing tool, aiding accurate and efficient editing within a live context, enabling Operators to remove ad breaks from live TX’d content.
• M2A’s Live Capture solution is accurate at a frame level

ITV’s renewal of its contract for Live Capture services is confirmed just in time for the start of a season of blockbuster formats, including Britain’s Got Talent and Love Island.