LUXEMBOURG—Our goal at POST Luxembourg is to consolidate our position as the country’s leading telecommunications provider. POST Luxembourg’s continued deployment of infrastructures is making a direct contribution to the country’s economic development and its international positioning as a beacon of excellence for ICT (Information and Communications Technology).
As the nation’s largest provider of IPTV services it’s of the utmost importance that we have the appropriate infrastructure in place. POST started working with ATEME in 2011 to encode our IPTV lineup, and in 2014, they helped us expand our offering with the addition of multiscreen and nonlinear services such as replay, timeshift and start-over. Today, ATEME’s TITAN encoders process more than 400 channels, which are then delivered by its origin-packager-recorder-storage, NEA-DVR and EDS.
This technology played a vital role in the success of our services and helped us meet the growing demand of nonlinear OTT services.
EXPANDING USE OF ATEME’S SOLUTION
With the success of our multiscreen service, PostTV, we knew we would have to increase capacities for streaming and storage of our OTT platform in order to support the increasing demand for nonlinear services. This required a new architecture that would make sure our streaming platform was available to any number of viewers watching simultaneously, while also removing both the operational and technical bottlenecks of the initial NAS (network attached storage) setup, to make it simpler and more scalable.
However, we also had to make sure our customers weren’t inconvenienced during the transition to the new architecture. We needed an approach that would keep our customers satisfied and allow us to continue meeting our commitments with third-party operators. Building a new architecture was considered too risky, so we chose to implement a dual-site architecture and extend our use of ATEME’s NEA-DVR solution—an approach that made both technical and commercial sense.
By leveraging ATEME’s NEADVR dual-site architecture, we were able to keep all our services running while we built a second, high-availability site from scratch, with ATEME helping us to quickly put an additional cluster in place to handle the extra load.
SIMPLICITY AND SCALE
We also saw this project as an opportunity to replace our former NAS with ATEME’s Embedded Distributed Storage (EDS), which reduces costs and complexity by distributing assets across the embedded storage available on each streaming server, instead of locating them on dedicated servers. Thanks to the seamless approach offered by ATEME, we were able to keep our NAS cluster running while we transferred its licenses into a new cluster in the EDS.
With this solution in place, we have been able to simplify our operations with a single solution to secure both storage and streaming, making our platform easier to maintain and scale. Additionally, by eliminating the need for a NAS, we now benefit from reduced costs and energy consumption, while improving redundancy and resilience.
PROVIDING HIGH-QUALITY VIEWING EXPERIENCES
With an expanded EDS, the NEA-DVR platform has become more reactive and stable, especially at the catch-up peaks in the evenings, which has improved the viewing experience. Looking forward, we will also be able to reuse our existing NAS to serve colder cloud DVR assets as second-tier storage.
This end-to-end solution provided by ATEME—from encoding to CDN, through packaging, recording and storage—has been extremely efficient and reliable. We’ve always been able to count on ATEME for expert and holistic support. In undertaking this project, we have ensured we can continue to provide the high-quality experiences and services our customers have come to expect, both now and long into the future.
Georges Klosen has worked in the telco domain since 1996 and has been responsible for IPTV from the beginning of 2007. He can be contacted at georges.klosen@post.lu.
For more information, visit www.ateme.com.
