NAIROBI, Kenya—While the pandemic appears to be in the rearview mirror, it clearly disrupted normal operations and workflows of broadcasters and media enterprises around the world.
Those media organizations that succeeded found new approaches to deliver their content. One of those success stories is Akili Networks, which launched what has become a wildly successful youth network.
Since March 2020, Akili Kids! has broadcast more than 1 million video files via the networks’ Cloud2TV virtual channel playout system from PlayBox Neo, the company said.
Akili Kids!, a fast-paced entertainment and educational TV network, serves about 1.2 million children with its programming every 30 minutes. Cloud2TV delivers a mix of over 650 video files every day for Akili Kids!.
With Cloud2TV and two PlayBox Neo servers at a Nairobi data center that provide secure Internet access, the network feeds over-the-air transmitters throughout the country. Content is uploaded to the playout servers from Nairobi and New York via internet, it said.
Cloud2TV's remote upload and management capabilities allowed employees to work from home and keep the network on the air. During the pandemic, Akili Network’s scheduling and traffic teams had to access the system from home, often with low bandwidth connections to build broadcast playlists, PlayBox Neo said.
Editors and program coordinators frequently had to use internet connections with heavy traffic to upload commercials, promos and content. Large content files, command and control and QC came from New York. Cloud2TV's remote upload and management capabilities enabled the network to overcome the internet challenges and continues to deliver operational efficiency and flexibility, it said.
The network receives media files in a variety of formats, including NTSC and PAL—with differing frame rates—for broadcast. The PlayBox Neo servers encode media files on the fly for over-the-air broadcast via Kenya’s 50MHz-based PAL/DVB-T2-based terrestrial broadcast infrastructure.
“We’ve reduced our costs considerably because we don’t need to transcode before playout,” said Akili Networks CTO Vincent Grosso. “Our PlayBox server plays out multiple video and audio formats into a single, seamless PAL 50 frame per second stream to the transmitters. That’s been a huge benefit for Akili these last four years.”
The PlayBox server transcoder also plays a critical role in supporting Akili’s programming mix. It can handle a wide variety of containers and file formats, including MPG PS/TS, MXF, QT, AVI, MP4, GXF, MPG2, H.264, ProRes, DNX HD and MJPEG, it said.
“With our schedule of fast-paced promotions, educational TV clips, marketing messages and commercials, sometimes video files are switched every 12 to 30 seconds,” said Grosso.
Akili uploads targeted promos every day commemorating local holidays and events. Customized clips are also edited daily. An original series called “Birthday Blast” mentions by name hundreds of kids each week celebrating their birthday.
“Their [Akili Kids!’s] launch was at the at the beginning of the pandemic, many of their operations staff were new to broadcast TV and the country’s IP infrastructure is less than ideal in spots,” said Van Duke, Playbox Neo director of U.S. operations. “And they are now the number one kids’ station in Kenya with a unique blend of dynamic programming. We look forward to seeing what the next four years will bring.”
More information is available on the company’s website.
