Visual Unity inks two-year deal with Czech TV

Leading broadcast and multiscreen systems integrator Visual Unity has signed a two-year contract with Czech TV to supply the technical services required to operate iVysilani,  its online and mobile service. Among many other projects, iVysilani recently delivered extensive coverage of the 2012 Olympic Games.

Pavlina Kvapilova, executive director of Czech Television´s New Media Division, comments: “Online consumption of Czech TV content has grown enormously in past years. Ivysilani.cz is a unique platform with more than 2592 days of video. Enhancing our streaming infrastructure towards the highest quality, stability and user comfort, which is available is a key factor for us to be able to serve this interest and react on changing lifestyle habits of our public.”

The new contract, which was awarded through a public tender process, will run until December 2014. Visual Unity’s vuMedia integrated content management and delivery platform is already used by iVysilani for content delivery, live streaming and VoD services. Under the terms of the new contract Visual Unity will deliver various enhancements to the platform and supply additional back-end encoding, streaming, transcoding and media management services.

Tomas Petru, president of Visual Unity, comments: “Visual Unity has extensive experience of designing, delivering and integrating turnkey TV systems, broadcast-IT convergent and multiscreen solutions. In recent years we have undertaken a variety of successful projects for Czech TV, including the design and build of an eight-camera high-definition outside broadcast vehicle and the enhancement of the broadcaster’s online and mobile services, enabling it to deliver unprecedented coverage of the recent Olympic Games in London.”

These include increasing Czech TV’s live streaming capacity from 60Gbps to 88Gbps in 2013 and 110Gbps in 2014, to support the broadcaster’s 12 live streaming channels. Czech TV has also asked the company to boost storage capacity for its VoD archive – a service Visual Unity has been providing since 2005. The broadcaster currently has a capacity of more than 70TByte and this will be expanded to over 160TB by the end of 2014.