60 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE Telestream
The ability to create a new channel within minutes rather than months remains a pipe dream, but Telestream might have found the answer with Telestream Orchid INSTANT CHANNELS IN THE CLOUD
Words by Adrian Pennington
The ability for broadcasters to launch new channels quickly and shut them off just as easily without incurring significant cost has become a prized goal of the TV industry. The promise is within reach as the hardware of days past is moved from local premises to cloud-based ‘virtual’ environments. But despite claims by some vendors of being able to create these new offerings in minutes, few have been able to do it outside of the lab or at scale. That could change as Telestream moves its new Telestream Orchid project from prototype into the market. The concept, on which it has been focusing R&D resources for 18 months, is described as providing a “one-click channel creation capability with fully integrated monitoring that is portable across all major cloud architectures and on-premise data centres.” Founded in 1998, Telestream has steadily grown through engineering and acquiring a series of products for encoding, transcoding and streaming file-based media. Owned by Genstar Capital since 2015, it added IneoQuest to its portfolio in 2017, an acquisition which forms the basis for its move into monitoring, analysis and optimisation of video.
Stuart Newton, former senior executive at IneoQuest and now VP in the corporate strategy group at Telestream, says there is pent-up demand among broadcasters and pay TV operators for technology enabling them to reach consumers with new content and services as quickly as pure cloud providers. He explains: “For a major sports event, for example, they want to create a channel within a week, for only a week, then take it down afterwards, but they are currently having to turn this business away because they simply do not have the flexibility to do it.” Similarly, when there are multiple major events (Wimbledon happening concurrent with an Ashes cricket tour), then the broadcaster may have to leave on the shelf valuable additional content – different camera angles or highlight reels – due to a lack of capacity. The conventional means of launching a new channel is to use a ‘channel in a box’; a hardware-based system which is relatively straightforward to install but still takes weeks if not months to configure. Cloud-enabled video streaming is rapidly evolving, however, and by using the cloud
for streaming, content providers will always be able to access the latest technical capabilities. Other applications enabled by the cloud approach include disaster recovery – the ability for a broadcaster to ensure service continues live to air in case of a critical dropout in its main systems. “Millions of dollars are being spent on bricks and mortar DR headends when there is seldom a need to use them,” says Newton. “There is a need to migrate to cloud, but the complexity has to be abstracted to enable the move. A solution like Telestream Orchid frees up more content and generates more revenue streams while the engineering of the infrastructure is taken care of.” CHANNEL-IN-A-CLICK Telestream explains that it has taken all the components necessary to create and stream a channel and reworked them into Linux-based containers. These modular elements, including encoder, transcoder, packager, origin server and probes for monitoring, can be composed in a variety of ways in the cloud then configured automatically to create an entire streaming channel from live and
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