Kay Johansson
EMERYVILLE, CALIF.—MobiTV has invested 10 years in developing its award-winning technology in connection with its reliable and scalable platform for securely delivering media to any viewing screen.
In 2010, our end-to-end-managed service platform delivered more than a billion and a half minutes of mobile video content to more than 14 million subscribers across every major U.S. carrier.
This is a high-volume operation, with the platform delivering live and video-on-demand content from major media and entertainment companies.
Our platform delivers media via existing wireless networks to connected devices. and we first began using Telestream's Episode Engine technology in 2007 for transcoding our large amounts of video-on-demand content.
NEEDED A FLEXIBLE SYSTEM
Carrier operators were continuing to expand their network capacity, and that, when coupled with the improved form and functionality of handsets (larger screens, higher processing speeds and easier to use applications), we were beginning to see increased adoption of mobile media entertainment by consumers. These were some of the factors in scaling our business. What we really needed was a system that could quickly convert a broad range of input and output formats, and we were looking for a solid, carrier-grade encoding solution.
Our analysis showed that most of the systems we evaluated either didn't offer the flexibility that we needed, or didn't provide the support for the range of formats that were necessary without bringing in a third-party addition.
However, Telestream's Episode Engine met all of our requirements in terms of flexibility and reliability, and has allowed us to provide VOD access to our customers and their end users. It has become a very important part of our operation.
Our workflow is structured to make the complex process of ingesting content from multiple sources, and then delivering this content over existing wireless networks to every major mobile operating system, a very simple and straightforward one.
Episode Engine accesses the uploaded content through watch folders, and its fine-tunable encoding settings allow us to customize the parameters to meet our customers' exact requirements.
SD/HD CAPABILITY A BIG PLUS
We run our high-capacity Episode Engine cluster 24/7, and the encoding process is now faster, less expensive and easier to manage than with our previous framework. Additionally, the ability to handle both standard- and high-definition content with the same ease is important, as our company moves to multi-screen distribution.
As a technology company with an imperative of operational excellence, we're committed to 99.99 percent uptime. Episode Engine lives up to the standards we have for our business. We're currently running more than 65,000 program files per day through our 24-node Episode Engine encoding cluster to meet our high-volume production needs.
Kay Johansson is CTO at MobiTV, and is responsible for shaping the company's overall technology agenda. He may be contacted at technology@mobitv.com.
For additional information, contact Telestream at 530-470-1300 or visit www.telestream.net.
