PARIS —Arkena (formerly known as TDF Media Services) helps media and telecom companies, content owners, and corporations manage their video content by adapting it for all types of viewing devices and delivering it where it’s needed. We have locations in 10 European countries and the United States, and have more than 500 employees.
We provide turnkey technical services that are customized for our customers’ specific needs (disaster recovery site, occasional operating needs, event-driven, short-lived channels and the like) and our playout services division operates more than 60 TV channels on a 24/7 basis.
A COMPLETE PLAYOUT SYSTEM
Mickael Drouet A couple of years ago, we were looking for a cost-effective and scalable server system to provide customers with a new range of playout services. We needed an integrated system that was easy to deploy and included graphics, subtitle insertion, audio shuffling, and redundancy. We undertook a benchmark study and evaluated a range of channel in a box solutions. When we came across the Broad- Stream Oasys integrated playout server, we knew we’d found a very good solution. We initially used it for a number of small channels. This worked so well that we migrated some of our larger customers over too.
We now handle playout services for 10 channels on Oasys servers. Each channel has its own server, plus another for backup. Once we configured the initial system, we were able to simply replicate the design for all the other servers. This saved us a huge amount of time whenever we needed to rollout a new channel. We’re now in a position to prebuild our next server system so that we can add a new channel for any of our present or future clients at a moment’s notice; it’s really that easy. Oasys is also efficient and simple to operate; deploying a new backup server requires no assistance from BroadStream, although their support team is very responsive.
Our company prides itself on its excellent service level agreement, and to help us achieve that we rely on the Oasys redundancy manager to monitor the playout machines’ health. Should anything go wrong, the redundancy manager is set to automatically change the downstream routing to put the backup channel on air while at the same time manage the synchronization of playlist changes made on the main server with any backups that are running.
We plan to expand our services in Eastern Europe with Oasys and we’re currently testing a proof of concept that we hope will be ready soon to run an Oasys infrastructure in Poland but manage the playout from here in Paris. This will allow us to use the expertise and efficiency of our Paris-based operational team while growing our playout business in the region.
This approach will also help us provide a disaster recovery solution that’s completely integrated in the service and will enable us to easily add new channels in a very short period of time.
Mikael Drouet is vice president of broadcasting at Arkena. He may be contacted at mickael.drouet@arkena.com.
For additional information, contact BroadStream Solutions at 404-327-8300 or visit www.broadstream.com.
