 VideoFlow solution turns error-prone microwave radio link into ultra- stable connection
IBC 2014 booth B20 in Hall 3
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Rosh Ha’ayin, Israel — 25 August 2014 -VideoFlow’s Digital Video Protection (DVP) technology is now being used by azamTV (www.azamtv.com) to turn unmanaged microwave radio links between Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam into high quality video delivery-capable links. The 2MB/s video stream was suffering from many errors over the radio link, which was susceptible to temperature changes and weather conditions. VideoFlow’s technology ensures high quality, live content over unmanaged networks and its proprietary software automatically corrects for lost packets ensuring jitter-free, perfect video. Committed to high quality video 24×7, azamTV used the VideoFlow’s Hitless Stream Redundancy feature to maintain high video quality even in case of link failure.
“The bandwidth fluctuations of the radio link were causing us major headaches with frequent loss of quality and picture breakdown,” explained Sivajith Sadasivan, Manager of Broadcast Media at azamTV. “This was just not acceptable as customers are paying for content. We tried the VideoFlow technology and it worked perfectly first time — and has been working perfectly since, giving very stable video over standard ISP connections.”
The VideoFlow solution uses a pair of DVP10 units. Content from Zanzibar is sent by a DVP10 Protector unit over two standard connections through two microwave radio links to a DVP10 Sentinel unit in azamTV Network Operations Centre (or Headend) in Dar es Salaam. Having two connections provides Hitless Redundancy in case one link is compromised as the second ensures that there is no disturbance to the video stream.
“This works perfectly in practice,” explained Balaji L Nagalgave, IT Manager at azamTV. “If one link goes bad, it switches seamlessly to the other link with no interruption to the video. We are so please with the success of using VideoFlow DVP technology on this link that we are planning to use VideoFlow technology on all our other contribution links with other countries in Africa. The flexibility of the VideoFlow solution means that it can be used to protect the video quality of streams sent over a variety of unmanaged and unreliable networks such as Internet, Ka band satellite, leased lines, etc.”
This content is gathered together and then sent to France where it is uplinked to a Eutelsat satellite providing azamTV’s thirty-channel DTH (Direct To Home) service in Africa.
Mr. Eran Shalev, VideoFlow’s VP Marketing, added, “Africa has a wide variety of legacy technologies and is also adding new ones creating a complex mixture of content delivery systems of variable quality. VideoFlow technology can ensure that whatever technology is used to transport the video stream, packets will not be lost and that the video stream remains at the high quality that broadcasters require. The azamTV project follows on from our successful installation at CANAL+ AFRIQUE last year. We are delighted to be helping companies rapidly develop the broadcast industry in Africa at an affordable cost.” VideoFlow technology Live video broadcast are sent as a continuous bit stream, which the Internet was never designed to handle, resulting in artefacts caused by jitter, and packet loss. More than a couple of seconds of latency is unacceptable by customers expecting to enjoy the excitement of live events like sport as they happen. VideoFlow’s patent pending technology opens the Internet for delivering content by ensuring that no packet is lost and nullifying the jitter caused by transiting the Internet. By doing so, it affords broadcasters, teleports and operators the opportunity to use a highly advanced, low cost solution for live, high quality video streams in place of existing, expensive solutions.
The DVP comes as a “Plug and Play” pair – a Protector, which stores the packets until it is certain that they have been correctly received, and a Sentinel which monitors the health of the video stream by watching for packet loss and requests packets to be resent from the Protector’s cache only if required. This is ensured by VideoFlow’s patents, which cover techniques to minimize the number of packets that have to be resent. VideoFlow’s solution is highly flexible working with internet connections as slow as 200Kb/s or as fast as 800Mbps yet delivering the desired high quality. VideoFlow’s patents also covers techniques to reduce bandwidth overhead to the minimum possible and to keep any delays at less than the two seconds, which is the maximum tolerated for true live broadcasts. VideoFlow’s DVP family of products enables the reduction of bandwidth requirements cutting operational costs compared to the current solutions.
Video demo at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9ZjpjIlonU&feature=player_embedded
azamTV azamTV is part of Azam Media Limited, one of the Bakhresa Group of companies (www.bakhresa.com). Bakhresa Group is one of Tanzania’s leading Industrial Houses with a turnover of $600 million and over 5000 employees. Its business interests extend from food to transportation and from media to real estate.
VideoFlow www.video-flow.com VideoFlow is the pioneer of live high quality video (SD, HD and above) over standard internet connections. Its DVP (Digital Video Protection) solutions rapidly pay for themselves by making expensive leased lines redundant for live broadcast. The high quality of the original high quality video input is maintained during its transfer over the internet without artefacts, jitter or latency greater than two seconds. VideoFlow has four key technology patents covering Live Content Delivery Networking (LCDN) with over a dozen patents pending. |
