|
July 2011 Magyar Telekom Streams Smoothly with Digital Rapids' StreamZHD Live ABR
telekom.hu
by Zoltán Kassai, Senior Expert in Service Development, Magyar Telekom
The Challenge: Flexible, high-quality encoding for live IIS Smooth Streaming and other adaptive bit rate technologies
The Solution: StreamZHD Live ABR
The Benefits: "[We] very much appreciate their combination of high quality; full range of supported streaming formats and codecs; and competitive price."
"We were very pleased that StreamZHD Live ABR was so fast and easy to integrate into our system."
View PDF Version
 Magyar Telekom (www.telekom.hu) is the principal provider of telecom services in Hungary, providing a full range of telecommunications and infocommunications (ICT) services including fixed line and mobile telephony, data transmission and non-voice as well as IT and systems integration services. The company's products are offered under the home-related services brand T-Home, the mobile communications brand T-Mobile and the business services brand T-Systems. Magyar Telekom is also the majority owner of Makedonski Telekom, the leading fixed line and mobile operator in Macedonia and it holds a majority stake in Crnogorski Telekom, the leading telecommunications operator in Montenegro.
Magyar Telekom's majority shareholder (59.21%) is MagyarCom Holding GmbH, fully owned by Deutsche Telekom AG.
As part of our service development, it's important for us to understand and incorporate relevant significant technologies such as Adaptive Bit Rate Streaming, which enables higher-quality viewing experiences with robust reliability on the Web, mobile devices and over-the-top services. In order to provide the very best service, we have to investigate and rigorously test every component, such as servers, encoders and players. As a result of our testing, we have chosen Digital Rapids as our encoder vendor and purchased their StreamZHD Live ABR adaptive streaming encoder.
Support for Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) Smooth Streaming to Silverlight-based media players was an important requirement of our selection, and we appreciate the fact that StreamZHD Live ABR can easily be extended to support new adaptive delivery technologies as they emerge.
We were already familiar with Digital Rapids products and very much appreciate their combination of high quality; full range of supported streaming formats and codecs; and competitive price. We first used Digital Rapids DRC-Stream encoders (the DRC-2500) in 2005 when T-Mobile started their Mobile TV streaming services, and it has proven to be a good decision.
We use StreamZHD Live ABR to stream sports, concerts and other events for free-to-Internet delivery and, for corporate events, in-house viewing. Analog and HD-SDI video inputs are encoded by StreamZHD ABR into the multiple outputs at varying bit rates and resolutions needed for IIS Smooth Streaming. As the content is delivered to each viewer, delivery from the IIS server automatically switches between these streams to deliver the best possible quality based on the viewer's current network and local system conditions - delivering the best quality possible even under changing conditions.
We were very pleased that StreamZHD Live ABR was so fast and easy to integrate into our system. Comprehensive and clear documentation together with the simple user interface made the whole process very straightforward for the staff.
|