51 CONTENT FOCUS Pop-up Channels
“For pop-ups around live events, for example, it’s good to have some kind of consumer access control,” advices Furgusson. “You’ll be running your camera test and preparation well in advance of the start time, but you don’t want the consumer to see that. You want them looking at a splash screen, maybe with some information about the event’s start time. Then when it’s time to go, someone presses the magic button and that stream, which is already available in the background, will go live.” MediaKind has been providing 360 live events for the past year, including sports and music events. Those have been generally streamed to a CDN then to a bespoke app. The company has also added functionality for publishing to YouTube. “That’s more akin to what some of the esports providers are doing today. A side benefit of using YouTube as your delivery mechanism is it gives you the ability to store it,” adds Furgusson. PERFECT DELIVERY Even though they may just be spun up experimentally, pop-up channels still need
to provide the highest possible quality to the viewer. They may have been launched over a weekend, but they need to look as good as anything that took months to build if they are going to compete in a content-flooded marketplace. Michael Poppler, director of international sales at IP video delivery specialist, Zixi, has noted more and more requests among top-tier content owners for pop-up channels. “They may want to launch a special TV channel for the holidays, for example, and they want to do that in short order,” he says. Zixi is an enabling technology for transporting video. The platform runs in the cloud, or on a virtualised playout server, and enables fast, efficient delivery to the cloud and from there to whatever affiliates the pop-up channel needs to be delivered to and at the appropriate bit rate and resolution required. “When I started at Zixi six years ago, it was the tier two or tier three broadcasters that had no other choice but to look at internet-based delivery,” says Poppler. “Today, it’s almost all of the major tier ones. Our customers include almost all the
major content owners on the planet so if they decide to spin up a pop-up channel, we can make uplinking and downlinking that content easy for them.” Those tier two and three customers of Zixi, the ones who originally put Zixi on the map, will rely on the company’s technology to get their content to its destination as cleanly as possible, often with a CDN in the public cloud – ie, AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. “There are a number of cloud-based solutions that provide playout as a service running in AWS – like Veset and Evrideo – that offer the entire channel playlist as a service. One of our customers, FashionTV, can use those with Zixi to upload their video to the cloud from, say, a live event in Milan and then set up a downlink to their global affiliates in different bit rates,” explains Poppler. “I’ve heard this called the ‘democratisation of content delivery’. “Now you don’t have to be a Viacom or a Turner. Now, for creative folks who have a great idea for a TV channel or live event, it’s incredibly easy to deliver content perfectly to any cable company in the world all within a short period of time.”
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